


Hot Habanero Chocolate Truffles

by TrickySleeves



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bakery and Coffee Shop, Chocolate, Chocolatiers, Christmas Eve, F/M, Felix's Birthday, Food Porn, Hand Jobs, Holidays, New Years, Phone Sex, Seasonal, Service Industry, Valentine's Day, a very fluffy ending, background Claudevain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:47:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27425194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrickySleeves/pseuds/TrickySleeves
Summary: Claude was wrong, Byleth thought. Having coworkers was going to be just like highschool, right down to the lockers covered in dirty magnetic poetry. She already hated it a little bit.With pink sleeves peeking beneath the rolled cuffs of her chef coat and her hair tied back into a ponytail, she looked just like she did in every one of her livestreams. If she found out that Felix watched her videos at night? If she knew how often he fell asleep to the sound of her voice?“Well, let’s get started,” she said tucking a truffle fork and sharpie into her shoulder pocket. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 93
Kudos: 163





	1. cigarette daydreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> november
> 
> (cw: mild mention of bullying)

**Truff:** hot habanero  
**Filling:** dark-milk ganache, infused with ancho chilis, spiked with habanero oil  
**Shell:** 70% Brazilian  
**Ideal palate:** spice lovers or masochists

Every baker on YouTube had a signature smile. A sickly sweet, impeccably branded grin intended to scorch your brain with some ‘para-social relationship’ they’re ‘building’ with their audience. Not this one, though. If Temper Demon ever smiled for the camera, Felix would expect the ground to open its greedy maw and swallow her right down into it.

A veteran of the chocolate tempering trenches, her eyes hit the lens with a thousand-yard stare.

She raised her whisk and tapped thick ganache from between its wires. “Cocoa fats take time to absorb flavor. It won’t be spicy on the first day. By day three, though, this filling should be enough to light you on fire.”

For a second, the treacherous 1 am part of Felix’s mind was whispering about just how much he wanted to be lit on fire. It’s a lot. It’s a burning, needy, thick saliva in the back of the throat, fingers inching down past the laptop that was resting on his chest—a lot.

She was all alone in a kitchen half-outfitted for chocolate work. Marble slabs lined laminate counters, and there were two chocolate warmers plugged into one corner. The other half walked the line between bachelor’s pad and sports bar.

If Temper Demon lived alone, she was one hell of a dude in her off-time. The stouts lining the fridge door and the sports bracket taped to a cabinet suggested that she lived with someone else. He wondered who. Did someone kiss her temple at night or thread their hands through her hair in the morning? Was there someone who hung out in her kitchen before she filmed and taste-tested her recipes? Did someone egg her on to add more booze, kiss the chocolate from the corner of her mouth?

She never mentioned a partner or significant other. No husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, or even roommate snuck their way on screen. But that was assuming she mentioned anything personal at all, which she didn’t. Felix followed her neglected Twitter, rang the bell for her YouTube subscription, and paid monthly into her Patreon. It was all professional, of course, all for the chocolate tips.

Temper Demon’s personal life? Either she kept it under lock and key, or there simply wasn’t any. Baller move either way.

He’d watched this particular video about fifteen times already. It’s one of her least popular videos. Not because it wasn’t good, but because when amateurs look for homemade chocolate truffle recipes, they wanted caramels or soft ganaches. They didn’t want no-sugar-added, spicy, light-your-mouth-on-fire-and-force-you-to-chug-milk habanero. This video was just for him.

She looked into the camera, green eyes seeming to make contact with his as she explained the process of steeping chili peppers in heavy cream. Felix ran his hand through his hair, thick, blue-black and laid back in heaps over his pillow. Some nights, he liked to imagine himself being held. It was stupid; it got him through the night.

Temper Demon kept her minty green hair tied in a choppy ponytail, looking like someone gave up halfway through cutting cold butter into a flour batter for pie dough. A lump here, and curl there. She only wore her black latex gloves when handling the final product. In the video frame, she stirred her tempered chocolate with a whole arm movement that accentuated a lean bicep, half-hidden under a black chef coat with pink trim.

She ladled the chocolate into a piping bag, squeezed it into the hollow of each truffle mold, and let it set up partially to make the chocolate shell. Mold pinched in her left hand, her right used a scraper to tap the bottom. This step helped any bubbles rise to the surface. He knew from daily practice.

She tapped along to the beat of her background music and did a little dance. Shifting back and forth, then a little shoulder roll. Right, that’s the other reason he liked this video, her silly dance. She was coordinated with good footwork, but whatever foot-loose and fancy-free she felt never made it to her face. Still swaying, she poured the excess chocolate back into the warmer and scraped the perfect shells smooth.

Next, the ganache arose like magic from all of her _mise-en-placed_ ingredients. She brought the chili-infused cream to a boil, then cooled it back to 120 degrees, before she poured it over the chocolate pieces. As she stirred, flecks of the chocolate began emulsifying with the cream. At 92 degrees she added the butter diced into perfect squares. No thermometer, she did it by feel, and he’s never seen her break a ganache. Once it had that satiny shine, she added in the extra chili powders and habanero oil.

At work, Felix rarely tasted his own ganaches. He was forever sending spoons over to Annette to taste test. This ganache though—his mouth watered every time he watched this vid.

While the ganache cooled, Temper Demon plucked one of the truffle shells from the mold and held it out to the camera. It was a tiny work of art, an impressionist painting of a flame. She didn’t smile, but she settled back onto her heels and cockily twirled a small offset spatula around her finger.

“If you try it on the first day,” she narrated as she poured the ganache into another piping bag, “it has an earthy flavor. Like eating a chocolate eggplant or mole sauce. Give it a few days for the spice to mature.” Careful and swift she piped the shells full.

He drifted off with the laptop on his chest before she could pop them from the mold. Her explanations were soothing as his eyes flickered closed. He imagined her fingers loosening the buttons of her chef coat. She’d bring one hand to her lips, pointer finger dipped in ganache, a forbidden taste test that goes into her mouth and runs across her tongue. Out of professional curiosity, he wondered what she wore under that chef coat…

— — —

**Truff:** pumpkin spice  
**Filling:** pumpkin and white ganache with a layer of cinnamon caramel  
**Shell:** 48% milk  
**Ideal palate:** sugar boost before a second date hike

  
November mostly sucked. Oh, the customers got their kicks. They special ordered their pumpkin pie, ate their pumpkin spice truffles, drank sweetened lattes, and sugar crashed through fall leaves while munching on Mercedes’s chocolate cornbread.

Anyone who’s worked the production side of retail, though, knew to dread November. Holiday crunch snapped spines and sent workers home with PTSD dreams of overflowing order boards. Tensions ran high, crew members bickered; it happened every year.

A life dictated by the dark-whimsy cycle of commercial holidays. Boom and bust, Christmas fed into New Year’s, then there was the big one, Valentine’s Day. A marathon, a sprint, a bungee jump off the Goddess Tower at the Church of Seiros.

Each morning, his shift began at 6 am. Backpack chucked into a locker covered with magnetic poetry word magnets that have been organized into a dirty message from Sylvain:

_picture her smeared red in a summer storm_  
_eat your heart out_  
_chocolate god_

That fucking lush. Felix found a word:

_repulsive_

He stuck it on Sylvain’s locker next to a post-it bearing seven digits and a barely legible name, plus Dorothea’s handwriting: “Some chick left this for you.” Felix could almost hear the purring gossip sing-song through his head. One thing confirmed, Sylvain would be insufferable at work that day.

Chef coat on, crisp sleeves rolled to below his elbows. His fingers swept to fasten buttons, waxing blasé over the embroidered ‘Chef Felix Fraldarius, White Clouds Chocolatier’ on his breast pocket. He tied his hair back into a tight bun, doubled-over a fresh apron and wrapped it around his hips, hung a clean towel from the string.

Axioms marched across Felix’s brain, the threads of his procedural movement, day-in and day-out.

_Sticky-roll away the two white cat hairs from your black chef coat. Tap the foot peddle and wash your hands. Count to twenty-five in the shockingly cold water._

Someone’s moved the box of medium-sized gloves again.

_Don’t ever let me catch you touching finished product bare-handed. Do you even know what the heat of your fingers can do to tempered chocolate?_

Felix restocked the truffle case while the front of house barista opened. He grunted “morning” in return for Ashe’s cheery, “Hi Felix.” Ashe often played twee pop over the speakers. Felix would never admit how little he minded the music, and Ashe never commented when Felix skipped a song.

_People eat with their eyes first._

Another axiom. The truth is, the truffle case was much like a jewelry display. He first pushed each high-priced morsel of art forward. The culinary rule of first-in, first-out. Then, he used a ruler to keep it straight. All the stripes went in the same direction. Clean lines, perfect shapes, cool marble slabs, and shiny tempered chocolate truffles.

Restocking was a glorious distraction from the order board lurking just around the corner of the kitchen. A clipboard strained under the pink paper orders: 12 boxes of 25 truffles; special truffle order of 150 lemon ganache enrobed in white chocolate, as if anyone needed anything that sweet; special cocoa butter transfers ordered to say _‘Holidays with the Von Hellman-Gloucesters’_.

The order board flaunted thicc binder clips and tried to catch his eye, but Felix didn’t like eye contact. Its dominatrix whisper crossed the space between them: _300 Xmas party favor boxes of four truffles each, chef’s choice_.

Ashe was back from arranging the tables outside just in time to witness the sexual tension between Felix and the order board. Sweeping back his silver hair, he began to count the drawer.

“While you’re opening, half-price these Halloween ghost and skeleton truffles.” Felix closed the case and swept aside bangs that had been bugging him for the last seven minutes. “The pumpkins can stay full price through November.”

“You’ve got it, Felix,” Ashe said.

Ashe had freckles the way the night sky had stars, like the speckled designs Felix sometimes airbrushed across his truffles. Some days, inspiration came naturally. Other days, you’re desperate enough to look at your friend’s face and imagine what they would look like as a piece of chocolate. Ashe’s face: champagne truffles, dark shell with silver speckles.

“Felix, are you okay?” Ashe asked peeking up from where he was dropping bacteria-infested coins back into the drawer.

“Sure. Thinking about seasonal flavors.”

“You’re always thinking about work, aren’t you? You should take a break.”

Even the most prestigious chocolate shops lived or died by the chocolate calendar. There’s never a good time to take off, but if there was, it would be in March. A brief moment after Valentine’s burnout and before wedding season.

Back in the kitchen, Mercedes was bent into the oven pulling out chocolate croissants. Felix scowled at the order board like an enemy he could cut down. The bakers had their pumpkin pie requests piling up, but on the chocolate side, there was nothing due until early December. After that, Felix had his work cut out for him.

Mercedes filled a parchment piping bag from the shop’s enrober, a tempering machine and conveyer belt that covered things in chocolate, while Felix peeked at his current inventory. It was all coming down to one thing. He needed Edelgard to hire a temp, a skilled temp.

 _To be fair,_ the order board seemed to remind him, saucily looming over his shoulder, _who put him in that predicament?_ Oh yeah, he did when he ran out his last apprentice Bernadetta by yelling at her about crying into the chocolate. How was he supposed to know that would only make her cry more?

Felix wasn’t a monster. You just can’t cry into the chocolate. Seriously, water in the chocolate will ruin it all. So now Felix was stuck working time-and-a-half overtime and pulling Annette away from her toffee and fudge-making when he was in a bind.

While Felix stirred his chocolate warmer, in the same process that he’d watched Temper Demon do last night, Annette and Lysethia entered the kitchen in street clothes. Both of them were looking at something on Lysethia’s tablet.

“Hi Felix!” Annette said with her usual 9 am cheer. “Mercie, come look at this!” Lysethia set up the tablet for everyone to see. Temper Demon’s voice came out tinny from the shitty speakers. “Your bacon strips need to be at room temperature before you dip them, otherwise they’ll automatically bloom the chocolate.”

Felix stepped behind them to get a good look at those familiar green eyes peering into the camera while she held up a slice of candied bacon. Then, something strange happened, something Felix had never even expected to see.

Someone mumbled something from off-screen and Temper Demon laughed. It was a soft low cackle. She might even have smiled.

“Was that someone in the background?” Felix asked without thinking.

“It is odd,” Lysethia said thoughtfully. “She doesn’t usually have other people in her videos.”

“Oh, do you watch her Felix?” Mercedes asked.

“Felix always says she’s overrated,” Annette chimed in glibly. “Even you might like this one. She’s making chocolate-covered bacon.”

“I don’t need sugar on my bacon.” He deliberately turned away from the screen and ignored Temper Demon’s voice as she explained how to pipe decorations.

“Well, I’m going to try it soon,” Annette said smiling. “You don’t think she’d mind if I borrowed the technique, would she?”

“How would she know?” Felix’s voice was snapping. Something burned in the back of his throat, a dark feeling that stung like whiskey afterburn. Who was that voice in the background of the video?

“Good point. How are our holiday truffles coming, by the way? Do you need me to switch from chocolate-covered espresso beans today?”

“No. Stay on your beans.”

“Who’s this?” Edelgard asked, stopping on her way to the back office. She was the only one not tugging on a black chef coat, and that was because she owned the place.

“Temper Demon is her tag. She’s a super innovative home chocolatier.”

“A mercenary,” Felix muttered.

“Home chocolatier? That’s difficult to do well,” Edelgard mused. “Interesting. Lysethia, can I talk to you for a minute.” She swept her long coat into the office. Lysethia followed, one eye on the clock as if to say, _I don’t have time for this_.

— — —

**Truff:** whiskey caramel  
**Filling:** liquid caramel and bourbon  
**Shell:** 64%, with a candied peanut on top  
**Ideal palate:** pick-me-up on a bad day

  
Look. The holiday season was coming in hot, and there’s no time to train someone new. So here’s what you need to know about tempering chocolate. It’s all about the fat crystals in the cocoa butter. When they had the right crystalline structure, the chocolate should set up hard, shiny, and it snaps when you break it. Fuck it up, and your chocolate will look mottled with powdery streaks called blooms. Ya dig?

On the battlefield of chocolate work, white chocolate was a general of the armies. Felix despised it. White chocolate had no cocoa solids. Just cocoa fat, powdered milk, and sugar. It tempered too soft, and it's abominably sweet.

Unfortunately, the first order of the holiday season was for five hundred white chocolate champagne truffles.

“Hot buns, hot buns coming around!” Lysethia called as she rounded the blind corner that separated the front confections kitchen from the back baking kitchen.

Sylvain popped back as the storefront lulled, lips marring the impeccable fern-art in his cappuccino. “Heard about Lysethia’s hot buns and came to check them out.” Some foam caught on his upper lip. Felix didn't mention it.

“That’s harassment, you perv,” Felix said, rolling and stretching his shoulder from vigorously stirring the white chocolate in his warmer. Saturdays like these meant a busy front and quiet kitchen. Normally, it was just Lysethia, him, and the cake decorator Hilda. It was also the day before his Sunday/Monday weekend.

He used baking parchment to test his temper, then turned to decorating the chocolate molds. He gradually heated the silver cocoa butter, using a technique he learned from Temper Demon.

As he worked, he couldn’t stop thinking about that laugh from her new chocolate-covered bacon video.

Felix went through the motions. Airbrush a design, pour chocolate into the molds, tap it out, and let them sit. His shells were thin, which is normally a good thing, but these were suspiciously thin. The chocolate was taking too long to set up.

He thought of the way Temper Demon brushed the bangs out of her eyes sometimes. Then she would look at the camera, wide-eyed and brow skeptical, like it caught her in some illicit act.

When the chocolate still wasn’t setting up, Felix knew he was in trouble.

He imagined Temper Demon’s little swaying dance as she tapped her molds. It never matched up to the beat of her background music, meaning that whatever she was really listening to while she worked, she wasn’t sharing it with her audience.

The shells were finally hardened for better or worse. Felix tried to lift one from the mold. If it was tempered, it would pop right out. It didn’t.

He flipped the mold over and used the scraper handle to tap them out. _Rap tap tap, rap tap tap. Bang bang. Bang bang bang._ He grunted under his breath, as Lysethia poked her head around from the back kitchen.

“What a racket,” she said sourly. “What’s going on?” All across his work station, truffle shells that amounted to six hours of work were crushed, bloomed, broken, shattered, and just plain stuck in the molds. “You’re off your game, Felix,” was Lysethia’s bland summary. “That’s not your only problem. I was grabbing some caramels from the closet, and, look, all these are bloomed.”

She held out four square truffles on her palm. They were mottled, gray, and powdery around a pristine line of sea salt running diagonal across the truffle.

“The whole tray?” The defeat in his voice was enough to soften even Lysethia.

“It must be over three hundred truffles. We’ll have to mark them all off as lost.” She watched his head duck lower and lower. “Didn’t you just make these a couple days ago?”

“Yes,” Felix hissed sibilant over a dry throat.

“Bummer,” Sylvain said coming back for his restock. He looked from Felix’s broken mess of a workstation to the truffles in Lysethia’s hand. “Guess that means we’ll have to eat them all.”

“I don’t want any. You take them Sylvain.”

“Are you sure you’re okay, Felix?” Lysethia considered him shrewdly, unable to soften her tone completely. “You’ve had a lot of loss lately.”

“I know, I know.”

“Take the rest of the day off, come back fresh.”

A bad day in a chocolate shop seems laughable. There’s no lasting damage and no one gets hurt. It’s just chocolate, something so small in the grander scheme of the spinning world (supply-chain notwithstanding). 

The thing is, sometimes we don’t have jobs that change the world. Sometimes, the jobs we have make sense just to us. Maybe we’re bringing others joy. Maybe we’re just sparking our own passion. But a bad day when you’re not living up to your own expectations, is still a bad day.

Homeward bound on the public bus, Felix pulled up Temper Demon’s newest video with that stupid chocolate-covered bacon. There she was with that little laugh.

 _What did she do on a bad day?_ He wondered. _Did she even have bad days?_ He was sure he’d never know.

She looked into the camera. Those green eyes were a color he’d mixed in cocoa butter paint for a dozen different truffle flavors. Cool mint staring straight through him.

— — —

**Truff:** passionfruit tea-time  
**Filling:** passionfruit pate fruit over dark ganache and a crunchy shortbread  
**Shell:** 64%  
**Ideal palate:** a wakeup call with morning tea

  
Did Byleth ever have bad days? What the hell kind of question was that? Who doesn’t have bad days? Rude comments under her videos. Inboxes full of assholes who had the gall to call her an ‘influencer.’ Thirsty male pastry chefs slipping into her DMs thinking her an easy mark cause she never went to culinary school. Get a life, mofos.

Then there was the ‘codename: new thing,’ as Claude was calling it to keep her freelancer panic to a minimum. A job offer at a small local business.

“What’s it called again?” Claude was spinning his coffee cup between long fingers and clean nail beds. The nerves were fake for her benefit.

Claude’s nerves had all turned to steel that one time in highschool that he was beat up after winning the chess tournament. Or maybe it was when they scratched ‘Arab’ into his locker and wrote in sharpie that he ‘squats 2 pee’.

Byleth, for her part, had learned about her teeth and claws the day she met Claude’s tormentors out by the football stadium. She had kicked their asses two ways to Sunday with that mean right hook that had once won Jeralt a boxing medal. Not to mention, her knee exploding upward into every one of their crotches enough times that impotence might still be an issue.

The logical conclusion: best friends forever.

“White Clouds Chocolatier. They’re good and all, but I’ll have a set schedule…” She shook her head. “And even worse—coworkers?”

“Coworkers can be useful.”

“Why do I feel like it’s going to be just like highschool.”

Highschool. Byleth’s unfashionable mullet because her father never thought to schedule an appointment at an actual salon. Claude’s gay panic that made him lose the final round of the regional chess championship to some foxy-freckled redhead who pretended to be an oaf but was a secret gambit master.

“Nothing’s as bad as highschool. Seriously, that’s what you think workplaces are like?” Byleth shrugged. To be fair, she was only half wrong. “If there are cliques, rule them or ignore them. That’s what we outsiders do.”

“Shot of whiskey before I go?” Byleth asked morosely into her palm.

“Stick to espresso shots on your first day.”

Most service industry ran on the dubious clockwork of cigarette breaks. Not all cig-powered-clocks ticked at the same speed. For example, Felix’s brother Glenn worked the line in the kind of kitchen where half the chefs were coked up a quarter into their shift. That clock started spinning real fast. On the other hand, if you worked on the high-end lines of Rodrigue’s head chef legacy restaurants, then you knew a thing or two about limiting your smoke breaks.

For a retail bakery like White Clouds, time was soft and sometimes meaningless. Some days, Felix might shoot out over a thousand truffles. Others, he was lucky to finish three hundred. Chocolate work is a process, it builds layers upon layers, and it tries to convince you that time works like that too.

One thing’s for sure, though; the first cigarette of the morning was the best inhale you’ll get that day. For his break, Felix has taken off his chef coat and thrown on a leather jacket to shelter against a colder November than any city had the right to.

Smoke was curling up into his bun and wreathing him like an art nouveau poster when a woman with minty green hair walked around the corner. Felix felt his heart stammer a breakbeat, suddenly pounding syncopated, as the rest of his smoke pushed inelegantly from one breath.

He was almost positive Temper Demon had just walked by him. She was in a cinched black coat, and beneath it were patterned tights and heeled boots, fashion details his imagination never filled in on its own. Nor was her hair pulled into that ponytail, and she was slightly shorter than he had expected her to be.

He stubbed the cigarette against the bricks, heedless of falling embers, and trashed it before following the woman around the corner and toward White Clouds Chocolatier.

She was walking down the street toward his shop.

She was opening the door of his shop.

She was going inside his shop.

The bell sounded as she walked in, and a purgatorially bored Sylvain called out a loud welcome before refreshing his Instagram feed.

Edelgard and Lysethia rustled forward from the back office, while Felix slipped in the door behind Temper Demon and busied himself making a lavish americano (which, no, he would fight you that this was not an oxymoron). Both women beamed at Temper Demon, and Felix realized—with his mug overflowing with hot water and too many coffee grounds mounded into his espresso handle—that this visit wasn’t a coincidence. She had been invited.

Sylvain whistled to Felix. “A new hire this close to the holidays? And she’s gorgeous. Too pretty for back of house...”

“Is she?” Felix asked with that awkward realization that what he thought was attractive might have some claim to universal attractiveness, rather than being a personal quirk. Fuck. Temper Demon was one of the pretty people. Felix had never factored this into her success. He had also never factored it into why he would watch her videos late at night or fall asleep listening to her talk, or think about her in the shower, or… shit. Felix was screwed. Or he’d like to be screwed. But wait a minute—

_“Wait what? A new hire!?”_

“What are you freaking out about?” Sylvain asked lazily. “We always pick up FOH temps before the holidays.”

“But she’s a chocolatier.”

“Oh…Ohhhh.” Another of Sylvain’s obnoxious whistles. “She’s here for _you_ then. Do you think she’d be into redheads, or do you think she’d be too worried about our hair clashing?”

“Even you can’t be that vapid, Sylvain.”

“Sorry, Fe, but I really can.” Sylvain looked at his friend closely, freckled brown eyes zooming in on Felix like he was one of the chocolate-devouring marketing chicks Sylvain always had in his crosshairs. Felix blushed. Fuck. “Wait a minute. Something’s up. Fe, is it the new girl? Is she making you blush?”

Felix shot-gunned the coffee and slammed the mug back on the counter. “Clean that,” he grunted.

“Sure,” Sylvain said slowly, trickster grin a little crooked to reveal bright white teeth. Just then, the bell tinkled again, and Sylvain shot back to the register.

Edelgard was leading Temper Demon toward the kitchen now. She swung her ashen hair and looked over at him: “Come with us, Felix, and meet Byleth, our new kitchen manager. She’ll be helping you with production through at least Valentine’s Day. Felix,” Edelgard turned back to the new hire, “is our confections manager, and our main chocolate worker.”

Felix stepped forward. He could feel coals burning in both his blindsided cheeks. Some part of him still believed that this was a nightmare he hadn’t managed to wake from.

With a brusque handshake, he pulled rapidly away lest she smell the cigarette-stink clinging to his fingers. She didn’t seem to care. Her own hand was frigid. So cold he was surprised she even had a pulse. And he was a little jealous because cold hands were the mark of a born chocolatier.

Byleth had doubled-up her long jacket over her arm and was wearing a tight long sleeve shirt. Soft pink, almost too cute, it stretched across her chest, and Felix reminded himself to keep his eyes fixed on her face. Or at least her hands, hands are important too. At any other interview, she would have been woefully underdressed. Here, though, wearing what was essentially an undershirt was a signal that she was ready to put on a chef coat and dig her hands into the chocolate.

“I’ve seen some of your videos,” he said. “You’re skilled.” His glare narrowed on her too-familiar face, now sizing up a competitor.

Byleth’s expression was as straight and unreadable as it appeared on camera. “I’ve eaten some of your chocolates. They taste good.”

Felix wouldn’t know. He rarely ate a finished truffle.

“I’m surprised you’ll be a manager, though. With no experience in a commercial kitchen—”

“Felix, that’s rude,” Annette hissed from where she was coming up behind them, streak of chocolate on her cheek and rich-smelling caramel boiling in the background. “Besides, ‘no whisk, no reward,’ right?”

Felix rolled his eyes.

“I’m here to help with production,” Byleth said easily. Lysethia was just about bouncing from excitement.

“Felix,” Edelgard cut in. “Since you still need to put your coat back on, why don’t you get Byleth set up with a locker.”

Felix led Byleth into the narrow locker room, intensely aware of how close behind him she was following. If he put on the brakes, would she run into him?

“This one’s empty.” He indicated the locker next to his that Bernadetta had been using before she quit.

As he opened his locker to grab his chef coat, he saw her staring intently at its metal door. He closed it to see what had caught her attention. More magnetic poetry:

_bed bare peach smooth tongue together_  
_garden hair gorgeous goddess_  
_sweet drool_  
_lust ly blow you_  
_chocolate god_

“I didn’t write that.” Felix could hardly breathe, words spewing out in short puffs.

When did Sylvain have time to come in and write that? ‘Garden hair?’ Would she think that was about her? Either way, she would think he was a pervert. He hastily smeared the words, pushing them out of order.

“Wow." She raised her eyebrows. "Chocolate god, hmmm?”

Felix looked aside to hide the flush that he knew was rising into his cheeks. “I swear I didn’t write that.”

She could see his adam's apple bob as he swallowed hard. It was a long time since she'd made someone this nervous. Was he intimidated? No, not exactly. It had to be something else.

“Okay,” she shrugged and grabbed a clean chef coat from a pile.

Following Byleth from the locker room, Felix took the opportunity to compose some magnetic poetry on Sylvain’s locker:

_kind ly blow your self_

Claude was wrong, Byleth thought. Having coworkers was going to be just like highschool, right down to the lockers covered in dirty magnetic poetry. She already hated it a little bit.

Chef coat buttoned, heels ditched for a pair of crew shoes. With her pink sleeves peeking beneath the neatly rolled cuffs of the chef coat and her hair tied back into a ponytail, she looked just like she did in every one of her livestreams. If she knew that he watched her videos at night? If she knew he fell asleep to the sound of her voice?

“Well, let’s get started,” she said tucking a truffle fork and sharpie into her shoulder pocket. “Show me what you’ve got.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  [chapter song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfLzBmuRJMc)   
> 
> 
> Thank you to the Sword Kittens for helping me brainstorm Byleth’s YouTube name. I’m terrible at branding, so that helps a lot.
> 
> Take care and thanks for reading!


	2. short skirt/long jacket

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> november

**Truff:** stout beer milkshake  
**Filling:** the malted sugar high you loved as a kid plus a totally grown-up bitter stout reduction  
**Shell:** 62% dark-milk, the best of both worlds  
**Ideal palate:** grab me a cold one while you’re at it

“For this month’s wildcard recipe, you all voted to meet my dad. Odd choice, but we’ll run with it. I’ve prepped his favorite truffles: beer-based stout milkshakes. The first step is to reduce your stout of choice, as I’ve already done,” Byleth tapped a pitcher of thick dark liquid. “To sweeten it up, I’ve made dark-milk shells. As always, I’ll post the formulas for patrons.”

“Now.” She beckoned a man into the camera frame. “My dad, Jeralt Eisner. The former boxing champion of the foothills adult rec league, now a kinesiology teacher and youth mentor.” With spiked-up dirty blond hair and a face lined like a roadmap, Jeralt’s only resemblance to Byleth was a twinned wry expression.

Byleth slung a frilly pink apron over Jeralt’s usual beige buttondown. He barked out a good-humored laugh as she tied it. The lacy bib barely covered his broad chest.

“I’ve prepared these malted milk balls for the crunch factor. The crunch factor is that little texture surprise in food that keeps you interested. Malt can also have its own umami which blends well with the creamy ganache...”

As she talked to the camera, Jeralt snatched a few chocolate covered malt balls from the bowl popped them in his mouth.

“So, Dad, all I need you to do is—” 

Felix had to admit, the munching sounds coming through the laptop speakers were an apt demonstration of the ‘crunch factor,’ though also disgusting to listen to.

“Wait! Stop eating the malt balls!”

“Why, Kid? You made extra.” He tossed one in the air and caught it in his mouth.

“One of my dad’s many talents,” Byleth deadpanned, as he threw a second up in the air and caught it between his teeth. “The skills you can learn eating peanuts in a bar.”

“Your turn, Kid,” Jeralt said, straightening a ruffle on his pink apron. Byleth opened her mouth as he tossed her a malt ball. It bounced off her chin, and she cackled lightly before her eyes narrowed to a competitive glint that Felix was already finding familiar.

“One more try,” she said.

Jeralt threw the malt ball and caught it like he was warming up a baseball pitch. “Alright, here goes.” Byleth’s dad was clearly the sports fan of the house, Felix thought, as he watched the man toss the little confection right into Byleth’s open mouth. This time, she crunched it around that catty grin that Felix had only ever seen once in person.

“So anyway,” she said, turning back to the camera with her trademark flat-expression. “Drop a malt ball into each of the shells, then I’ll pipe the rest.”

— — —

**Truff:** classic dark chocolate  
**Filling:** dark chocolate ganache, perfectly ratioed  
**Shell:** 64% and hand-rolled  
**Ideal palate:** for those who like their chocolates with a hard-to-crack shell and a soft soft center

You eat with your eyes first.

It’s the oldest maxim in the baker’s bible. Otherwise, there’s no point to pain-in-the-ass sugar work that reflects light like glass, or intricate curling garnishes, or airbrush paint jobs. Gem-like chocolates go into pretty little boxes, and they get tied up in pretty silken ribbons.

Some people don’t like sweets, though. Their eyes want to devour something a little more savory. They salivate over chili peppers hot enough to incinerate the tongue and burn them to crispy ashes from the inside out.

So when the door opened and Byleth rushed through it—green hair wilding out behind her, long jacket flying open and fluttering around calves perfectly stacked into heeled boots, toned legs and full thighs hardly covered by lacy stockings that met with the pleating of her short skirt—she might as well have been tied up in ribbons.

She knocked the door forward, making the bell chime like a fire alarm, while she tugged the hem of her crop top. Felix’s gaze flickered below the crop and traced the parenthetical definition of her abs. The more she tugged on the top, the lower-cut it dipped. Each slight bounce might have been making steam rise from Felix’s ears, as Byleth, wide-eyed and straight-mouthed, hurried inside—

“Shut your mouth before something flies in,” Sylvain whispered behind a Felix who was practically draping himself over the truffle case, face as red as the crimson cordial heart lying right below his palm. Felix’s jaw made an indignant shutting snap.

“Is there a problem?” Byleth asked, windblown and boot-clicking across the painted cement floor.

How to put this politely? Her sexy conflagration of work-inappropriate clothing—that was the problem. “You’re late,” Felix said.

He looked away as she shrugged, “I’m bad with schedules.”

“Did you bring pants?” The liquid nitrogen in his voice froze Byleth in her steps.

“What’s wrong with…?” Felix followed her eyes down to the little skirt then stared away into the truffle case.

“Absolutely nothing!” Sylvain cut in jovially. “It’s a perfect outfit. Besides, I think kitchen managers should be above the dress code. Don’t you, Fe?” Felix didn’t have to look to aim his elbow into Sylvain’s gut. 

_Owwww_ , the barista complained. Byleth looked from one to the other before lingering on Felix’s disapproving frown.

He still wasn’t looking at her: “Wear pants from now on.”

As she walked away, the spice-addict in the back of Felix’s brain couldn’t resist reminding him that at least now he knew exactly what she wore under that chef coat. “She is,” he slurped scalding coffee before breathing out, “ _the worst_.”

“Liar liar, pants on fire,” Sylvain sang.

“Are you five?!” Felix snarled and shoved four spools of ribbon into Sylvain’s arms. “Like I was saying, package this order. Brown boxes, gold ribbons…”

Felix instructed Sylvain with one eye on the back kitchen, and when he finally managed to get to work, he performed his duties with one eye on Byleth. The kitchen was small, Byleth was everywhere, and the Universe was cruel.

For two years, fantasy had self-medicated him through his lonesome lows. But he was never supposed to actually find out what was below her chef coat.

Because the eyes may feed on spice, but fantasies need mystery.

So when the Universe decided, _Guess what, that chick you’ve been dreaming about with your fingers in her mouth and her hands in your hair—she’s real,_

Felix lost track of where he was. And, suddenly, he realized that chocolate from the enrober was overflowing the bowl he had been holding for the last minute.

_She’s also here right now, big vacant eyes watching you spill chocolate all down the front of your apron._

Dark chocolate was running down his hips, moving down his upper thigh.

_Damn, that must be about three hundred grams of chocolate that you’ve spilled on your apron, Felix, you might want to clean that up instead of looking at her._

It traveled slowly, setting up as it went, like layers of cooling wax that fall down the side of a candle.

_This isn’t a porno, Felix, she’s not going to get down on her knees and lick it off, no matter what you fantasized a couple of nights ago when insomnia-brain had you turn on her livestream of molten souffle cakes._

_You better clean that up, my dude, because that chocolate is making its way toward those pretty teal pants of yours, and you know what a pain that would be to wash out._

Felix hated the Universe’s sense of humor.

“Do you need help?” Byleth asked, already grabbing for a wet rag and tossing it to him.

“I need a new apron,” he grunted. Embarrassment scalded his whole body, turning him pink as a boiled crab. While Byleth rushed into the dish pit to grab a fresh apron, he stripped off the chocolaty one with all the gusto of a pissed-off stripper jumping up from inside a hollow cake at their own birthday party.

— — —

**Truff:** almond praline  
**Filling:** layer of soft almond nougat over almond gianduja  
**Shell:** 74% dark, garnished with a candied almond  
**Ideal palate:** a family table full of salty takes

“…she’s irresponsible, walks around like she owns the place, completely inappropriate…” Felix couldn’t see that Glenn was rolling his eyes while unloading three butcher-cut steaks and a bushel of herbs from the fridge. Either way, though, the eye-roll wouldn’t have slowed his rant. “Yesterday, she made three hundred of the wrong truffle, and when I pointed it out, she shrugged and said, ‘that’s okay, these will sell anyway.’”

“Well, did they?” Glenn asked, setting a clean cutting board in front of Felix.

“They sold out that day, actually. But that doesn’t justify reading the order wrong, and I don’t care that she’s never worked in a commercial kitchen before, who wears a skirt to kitchen work? It’s frivolous.”

Next to a pile of finely diced onions, Glenn began slicing mushrooms into paper-thin slivers. It’s all about the seventeen-degree angle, he was known to brag with his whetstone permanently on the countertop. The steam rising from the pan already smelled like rosemary.

Felix had to bring from home his own stash of chili peppers knowing that Glenn would turn his nose up to any spice more potent than peppercorns. According to Glenn, spice fucked with the flavor balance. Felix thought he was about as boring as drinking a glass of milk.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“About the skirt?” Felix’s cheeks flushed. “I asked her to take it off.”

 _“Take it off?”_ Glenn sputtered, accidentally squirting the lemon he was squeezing against the backsplash rather than into the pan.

“No! Not take it off, just not wear it!” Felix waved his hand in the air as if he could clear away the dozen or so lust-addled mental images that were now bombarding him.

Glenn gave him a look that clearly said: _What’s wrong with you?_ “I meant what are you going to do about the coworker. You’ve been whining about her nonstop for weeks.”

It’s a rule of the Universe that every quietly judgmental person bonds with an outspokenly judgmental person. The quiet one makes expressions, the outspoken one translates those expressions into words. For the most part, the relationship is symbiotic, right up until one of them has to look in the mirror. Then, all judgmental hell breaks loose.

Most people have to search far and wide to find their matching set: a bond made in culinary school, a work buddy, a fuck buddy. Felix got lucky (or very unlucky if you asked him) because he was born with his, like a pair of salt and pepper shakers. Glenn held the salty takes. Felix held the peppery glares.

“I don’t whine,” Felix whined. When that was all he could say, he knew he’d lost the round.

“You whine all the time, little bro. Though usually not about girls.”

“I’m not whining about girls. I’m voicing a complaint about an irresponsible coworker. And no, I’m not going to do anything about it because while she’s still better than I am, I can learn from her.”

“Stir that rice, and then cut this basil.” Glenn watched dubiously as Felix pulled a chef knife from the wall magnet. “You sure you can handle that?” He asked disparagingly.

Felix flipped the knife around his hand, alternating it between three of his fingers so quickly that the blade was a whirl of steel. Then he spun it over the top of his hand, tossed it up, and caught it back-handed. Rote skill always put Felix back in his element, whether it was chocolate work or the knife tricks he had practiced _ad nauseum_ during culinary school. “Want me to juggle them?” he asked, smirking.

“Show off,” Glenn grimaced. Once he heard Felix’s knife thudding against the chopping board, he said, “I think you’re fucking up again, Fe. You’re vain, a perfectionist—

“Don’t start with that again. We can’t all be natural talents like you.”

“Listen this time, then.” Glenn dumped his vegetables into the saucepan and stood back as the steam plumed. “Your chocolatier discipline is showy, you’re obsessed with being the best, and you only want what’s unattainable.”

Felix put extra vigor into chopping his herbs.

“You obsess over her show, but the moment you meet her, she’s the devil.” Glenn threw vinegar into the mix and grinned at the sizzle. “Now all you talk about is surpassing her. You’re good, getting better, but you’ll never let it be enough. And, I have to agree with Sylvain, you have an eggplant-sized crush on her.”

“A crush? What am I, a teenager? You and Sylvain can go to hell.” Felix chopped aggressively at the stems. “She’s good and she’s making my skills better. That’s all.”

“Then why are you mangling my basil with your pent up rage?” Glenn came up beside Felix. “Look, it’s much easier this way.”

Felix’s knife stilled as Glenn started plucking basil leaves off the cutting board. “Stack the leaves on top of each other, largest on the bottom.” Glenn’s tone straddled that fine line between zero-expression and patience. “Now, roll them up tight, but not so tight they’ll bruise—like you’re rolling a joint, you know?” Felix smirked and followed Glenn’s cues. “Yeah, you know. Anyway, cut it this way and it’s less work.”

Blond-ponytailed and slightly bedraggled in a work suit creased from a full day at the office, Ingrid popped her head into the kitchen. “Hi, Felix!” She was pulling at a round-bellied corgi on a leash, _“Loog, stay.”_ Loog did not stay. _“Loog, sit.”_ Loog did not sit. Not that it made much difference since Loog was the same height whether he stood or sat.

Loog went over to Felix and sniffed at his legs. Because Felix always smelled good to Loog. He either smelled like chocolate or the fluffy long-haired persian cat that resided in Felix’s apartment like a king.

“Dinner smells _amaaaazing_.” Ingrid said giving up on Loog the moment Glenn sneakily handed him a few croutons from the salad fixings. “I’m so hungry. Felix, are you staying?”

“Yeah, Ing, he’s basically making the whole dinner. So if it’s bad,” Glenn raised his eyebrows, “you know who to blame.”

“Mmhmm,” Ingrid murmured dryly before bending her head to peck a kiss on the corner of Glenn’s mouth. “I’m just glad he’s here to keep your pretentions in line.” With that, she walked out smiling. Glenn smirked down into his cutting board, soft pink blush rising to his hairline.

They were disgusting with their whole being-in-love issue. Usually, Felix found that kind of annoying, and kind of gratifying, and kind of sweet… whatever, he didn’t want to talk about it.

— — —

**Truff:** raspberry rhapsody  
**Filling:** dark raspberry ganache with jam inside  
**Shell:** 64% dark  
**Ideal palate:** let’s be real, this is the safe option. raspberry and chocolate are a classic combo no one can turn down

Byleth was good for business. As soon as she announced where she was working, White Clouds received hordes of chocolate pilgrims seeking the elusive genius of YouTube baking fame.

It would be generous to say that she handled such attention well. It’s much more honest, to say that Byleth was a trainwreck at customer service. She hid away when customers tried to get a peek, got tongue-tied at their compliments, and almost lit the kitchen on fire with the propane torch whenever men came to foist flowers on her—

A lavender-haired man with yellow champagne poppies; a tall, blond, and ripped old friend of Sylvain’s with pink roses; an older, green-haired gentleman with a handful of daisies; one of Jeralt’s boxing protegees, a big dude, half the buttons popped off his shirt and an armful of wild lavender.

Each time, Sylvain mercilessly called her up to receive them. When the largest bouquet came in from a local who Byleth recognized from her Patreon message boards by his handle of @Gatekeeper, it took everything she had not to sink behind the counter and stay there all day.

“They’re pretty flowers, Chef,” Sylvain said once he had convinced the man that there were enough kitchen emergencies to keep Byleth busy until close and shooed him out the door trailing a feeble, _but I don’t see anything to report_. “I guess you get that all the time, though. Makes me wish I had thought to bring you a bouquet.”

“Why would you?” Byleth was looking down into the truffle case and taking stock of Felix’s pristine work.

She had never worked anywhere that showcased their food so preciously. Normally, food was food. Make it pretty, use fancy Gallic names, but in the end, it’s made for eating. Here, though, food was something to marvel at, little works of art, the products of skill and time. She ran her finger over Felix’s spiky chef signature printed on the glossy flavor guides they packed into every box.

“So you’ll go out on a date with me, of course. Dinner, candlelight, wine, a dessert you don’t have to make, we go back to my place, I try to take your clothes off.”

She looked at him, concern puzzling between her eyebrows. “I’m surprised.”

“You get flowers from strangers. Surely, you aren’t surprised by a little in-house attention.” Byleth picked petals from one of the daisies. “Next you’ll try to tell me how shy and coy you are,” he said, “like I’m supposed to believe that you were some awkward nerd in highschool who never got used to being an adult babe. I’m not buying it, Chef.”

“I _was_ awkward in high school. You should ask my friend Claude if you’re so skeptical. He has plenty of stories.” She had almost completely denuded the daisy now and was waving about its bare center like a magic wand. “What I’m surprised about, though, is why you’re lying. You don’t want to go out with me at all, so why say it?”

“Huh?” Sylvain grabbed the stem lest she sprinkle pollen all over the retail displays. He started cleaning up the petals.

“These flirtations are a game to you.”

“Because I flirt with all the girls? So you’ve caught on, Chef. Good job.”

Among the tall retail shelves—filled with exotic single-origin chocolate bars and Annette’s specialty confections: mint and peanut butter fudge, housemade marshmallows, caramel turtles, specialized cake and brownie mixes, panned candied nuts, and a dozen different flavors of chocolate-covered espresso beans—lurked Felix. With a laden basket on his arm, he was pretending to restock.

“It doesn’t seem like the kind of game that would make you happy.”

“What do you know about it?”

“You remind me of my friend is all. And if you’re anything like him, you don’t want to go on a date with me.”

Felix poked his head sideways from a shelf. Sylvain managed to catch sight of him just as his ponytail was swinging back into hiding.

“No I really don’t,” Sylvain said honestly while watching his secretive friend through the anti-shoplifting mirror installed above. Byleth was absorbed in ripping apart another flower. “Bet I know someone who does, though.”

“Oh sure,” she said, gazing skeptically down at the bouquet as if it was about to send her off on a quest for which she was wholly unprepared. _It’s unsafe to go alone,_ she imagined the attached gift card saying. _Take these roses._ She thought about turning around and dumping them all in the trash. “It takes more than flowers for me. Maybe you could split these bouquets up and put some vases on the tables for the customers.”

“That’s generous of you.” Sylvain whistled. He took the bouquet off her hands, grateful that she wouldn’t be making more flower-petal messes.

Byleth’s reputation dragged in fresh customers the way cats bring home half-dead mice to feed their owners. A boon, given out of the need to provide, to teach, and slight contempt.

Some of her visitors were welcome, as was the case with Claude who was practically family to Byleth.

However, when the bell rang over Byleth’s oldest friend as he entered the shop, all Sylvain saw was a dark-haired man with hazel-flecked deep green eyes mobile enough to switch from dreamy to bedroom in a millisecond.

Sylvain stopped mid-chat with one of the marketing chicks from the next building. She was a pink-haired woman named Anna who was always taking pictures of the shop’s wares and trying to sell them back for use in social media (which another pink-haired woman named Hilda already had locked down, thank you very much).

When Sylvain shut up mid-sentence to look over Anna’s shoulder at Claude, all dressed in caramel-tones that flirted with his olive skin and a beard that appeared as soft as it was well-trimmed, she looked like she was about to stab someone. Claude swept a hand through his hair, correcting wind-cowlicks from walking a few blocks in the fall weather.

“Well it was nice seeing you, Anna,” Sylvain said trying to give the woman a move on. She gabbed for another minute while Sylvain watched Claude peer from the truffle case, around at the cookies, the cake display, the ribbon wall. Dammit, why wouldn’t this woman leave? Oh right, because he flirted too well and she thought she was wanted. When finally he managed to wave her out the door, he roughed up some flyaway hair, pushed his bangs into place, and set his shoulders back.

“And how can I help you?” he asked the handsome man on the other side of the counter.

“I’m looking for Byleth Eisner,” Claude said, glancing back toward the kitchen.

“Really?” Sylvain’s voice went dry as a cappuccino sans milk foam, “You’re the second one today.” He began toying with a silken ribbon that he was tying around the final vase of Byleth’s bouquet. “Though most of her fanboys call her Temper Demon. The other one brought flowers.”

Claude laughed, as warm-toned as he was tan, and Sylvain, who might have been born as an ice sculpture licked from a glacier by a polar bear in the far north, felt that heat tingle through him. This man could be wearing nothing and he would still be dressed in gold. “I’m sure she loved that,” Claude said.

“Didn’t seem too jazzed about it, actually.”

“Well, Byleth is more of a buy-her-beer-and-take-her-fishing kind of girl.”

“And you?” Sylvain leaned against the counter.

Claude smiled slyly, “I’m more of a pour-me-a-single-malt-and-tell-me-all-your secrets kind of guy.”

Sylvain raised an eyebrow, “I have a lot of secrets.”

Claude tucked some hair behind his ear. He let his thumb travel down a pristine sideburn to linger in his beard. Then, as if suddenly realizing what he was doing—touching his hair, touching his face—he stopped. “Now that’s logic I can get behind. I could use a new pawn for my schemes.”

“Oh ho. A pawn? I’m wounded.” Sylvain threw back his shoulders, “I’m much more of a knight.”

Claude’s smiled remained hidden, only manifesting in the perfect dimple that was drilling its way into his cheek. “So these secrets, is one of them hidden chess skills?”

Sylvain laughed, throwing nonchalance to the wind, “Good guess.”

Just then, Byleth stepped up from the back and fell casually in beside Claude. “I thought I heard your voice,” she said. “You worry too much. I’m still here, not a complete flight risk.”

“So when you dramatically texted me, ‘I may not survive,’ that was supposed to be a show of confidence?”

“Just a joke,” she said, straight-faced as usual.

While the two friends talked, realization struck Sylvain like his head was trapped inside a brass bell and Claude’s words were the hammer: Had this Claude been the chess champion he had bested his last year of highschool? Sylvain pocketed the thought for another time. Instead, he settled with watching Felix sneak into the retail space for another covert restocking mission.

“Have you seen Felix?” Sylvain asked. From between two shelves, Felix shot him a murderous glare.

“Felix?” Claude asked.

“That coworker I told you about,” Byleth said. Sylvain raised an eyebrow: score one for Fe, at least she was talking about him. “He was working on the enrober, last I saw him.” She turned away, “I’ll grab my stuff.”

Felix had to flatten himself to a wall of shelving to avoid detection while Claude pretended to look around the retail space. Meanwhile, Sylvain was ripping off some blank receipt paper to hastily scribble a note, which he then tucked into a little cellophane bag with a raspberry truffle. “On the house,” he said, sliding the tiny package across the counter to Claude who picked it up smiling enough to accentuate the dimple in his left cheek.

Sylvain was looking everywhere but Claude’s eyes. “Thanks,” Claude said. Sylvain merely winked at him, as Byleth stepped back out loosely wrapped in her long jacket.

“Bye,” Byleth said over her shoulder when the two of them left.

Sylvain waited a beat until he could no longer see them through the window before calling, “You can come out now.” Felix stepped from behind shelving units looking almost as irate as he was contrite. “Listen, Fe. I’ve always admired how dense you can be, so I’ll throw you a bone: that guy is gay.”

Felix crossed his arms. “Why should that matter to me?”

“You’ve been skulking among the cake mixes watching Byleth with her suitors all day. Thought it would at least ease your mind to know that the person she left with is just a friend.” Felix scowled as Sylvain threw away some torn off receipt paper. “It’s been a long day. Let’s chill tonight? I’ll watch one of those samurai films you’re so into.”

“Sure.” Felix toyed with one of the vases on the counter.

“The flowers don’t impress her. I think if someone wanted to know her, they should just talk to her over a beer… and fishing?”

— — —

**Truff:** maple walnut  
**Filling:** walnut gianduja with maple pate fruit  
**Shell:** 70% and bitter winds  
**Ideal palate:** say it’s a cold fall and downright frigid in the shade,  
and say that the damp-cold morning is the perfect catalyst for remembering  
that one October day years ago, when teenage Byleth skipped school with Jeralt for a 4 am bass fishing trip.  
the wind snatched her hat off her head and dropped it into the lake,  
and she was leaning over the side of the boat to grab it  
when another strong gust came through and almost drove her headlong into the water,  
so Jeralt reached across the narrow boat to clutch her shirt,  
his voice hollering like a stone skipping across the lake: ‘Sitri!’  
and Byleth pulled up nearly tipping the boat, “I’m okay, Dad.”

some mornings, the wind just feels that way

By late November, complicated holiday ambitions were bloating the order board. The last-minute customers seemed to grow more imaginative and unrealistic in the face of tight deadlines.

While most of the kitchen was a buzzing hive of anxiety, Byleth shook off stress like water from a duck. She demonstrated a new airbrushing technique that made the truffles look like brushed silver, new tempering techniques that cut the time in half. And, whenever a song she liked played over the radio and she let herself dance a little.

“…massive eggplant-sized order, and it’s all custom so we can upcharge everything,” Byleth was saying as she and Edelgard walked back toward the office. “Four chocolate sculptures of the Saints of Seiros for a Christmas Eve banquet.”

They waved to the staff in passing. “How complicated… and absurd,” Edelgard wasn’t graceful about biting her tongue around every disparaging thought she had regarding the Church of Seiros. But small businesses didn’t turn away orders if they could help it. “Do you think you can do it? The event would be great publicity.”

Byleth was nodding her affirmatives as the two of them walked into the office. Suddenly, the phone intercom chimed out Dorothea’s voice: “Can someone come get Felix? He’s fighting with a customer.”

“He’s what?!” Edelgard thundered.

Byleth sped out through the kitchen to find Felix giving a tall angry-looking man a face full of his pointer-finger for having the gall to ask Annette, _how, if she worked in a chocolate shop all the time, did she stay so thin?_

This question was highly ranked on the chocolate shop’s list of things that seemed like a compliment but really _really_ weren't. Not only because they heard it about once a week, but also the bitter implication that a shop full of exhausted workers pulling overtime had nothing better to do than to hang around all day idly eating the product.

Felix raised onto his toes like a hissing cat and shouted into the man’s face: “I don’t come into your sedentary-ass bank job and ask about your fucking weight as you sit around shuffling papers.”

The customer was growing red in the face, and he had his fists clenched at his side. That didn’t stop Felix from escalating.

“Don’t you ever talk about my employees’ bodies again—I’ll kill you first, then I will sue you for harassment! I’ll give your name to my sister-in-law and she’ll—”

“Hey hey hey,” Byleth grabbed Felix by the shoulders. She eyed Dorothea to show the customer out. “Come with me.”

As Byleth dragged Felix backward, he hissed over her at the man, “And bring your friends next time!”

He fought her insistent tugging all the way to the staff room, but the kitchen manager was shockingly strong. “What are you doing?” he asked when she pushed him up against the lockers.

“Saving you from assault charges,” she said, wry lines at the corners of her mouth. Even through his chef coat, he could feel how cold her hand was on his shoulder. He grabbed the hand and watched her eyes widen. The locker room suddenly felt very warm and narrow. Byleth pulled back.

“He was rude,” came Felix’s only apology.

“I agree, but so were you.”

For that, Edelgard banished Felix to the back of house for a week. You mean, no customer service? No talking to customers at all? Win-win. But if Felix sometimes yelled at customers to protect other employees, it wasn’t the worst of their concerns. That was just the kind of manager he was.

“You didn’t have to do that, Felix,” Annette said later that day. “I know I’m scrawny. Thank you, though, for sticking up for me.”

“It wasn’t for you,” Felix grunted.

“Shhhhh.” Annette was standing on a step-stool to get leverage over stirring a vat full of marshmallows, sugar, and butter that would soon become fudge. “You’re harshing the vibe.”

“I think it’s sweet to yell at customers for your coworkers,” Byleth said unexpectedly. She was already drawing up concepts for the chocolate saints sculptures and beginning to construct bases.

“I bet you would too,” Felix said, sizing her up over the tines of his truffle fork.

Byleth looked up and around at each of the employees: “If somebody tried to hurt anyone here I would punch them so hard astronauts centuries in the future would find their empty skeletons orbiting Mars with their flesh and blood boiled away.” She gave a rare smile and went back to cutting into a chocolate slab with her x-acto knife.

“You’re quite the mama bear, aren’t you Chef?” Annette said in awe. “I bet your mom was fierce too.”

 _Tch_ , Felix went back to dipping his truffles. It was a mindless, mechanical process, but it was almost enough to take his mind off Byleth’s hand on his shoulder or the way she called him ‘sweet’.

“I never knew my mother. Jeralt was my mom and dad, and he’s strong enough to punch a guy all the way to Jupiter.”

She used a piping bag full of chocolate and cold compressed air to weld her shapes together. With a truffle fork, Felix was marking his bon-bons with a quick swoop of soft spikes. In between sets, he fixed Byleth with that searching look.

“What?” Byleth asked finally.

He dipped another six truffles in the chocolate and fished them out with the truffle fork. They shined on the drying rack as chocolate pooled off them.

“Felix doesn’t have a mom either,” Annette stage-whispered across the kitchen. She was watching them like they were two clockwork swordsmen in a music box, about to spring into life and perform a very intricate dance if only she could find the wind-up key.

“Your mom,” Felix asked finally. “Do you ever think—?”

“About how different I’d be if she were around? I reckon so, but my dad did what he could.”

“I don’t think you should be someone else,” Felix mumbled.

“Oh…” Something soft and nougat-sweet surfaced in her mind as she looked at him; she pushed it down. “Did you have a single dad too? Your dad and my dad should have a beer sometime and complain about us.”

He smiled slightly. “Rodrigue’s a wine-drinker. Besides, my brother mostly raised me.” Byleth continued working, x-acto knife skillfully angled in her hand. He hated how quiet she was in the no-nonsense black jeans he forced her to wear. “Those chocolate bases are looking good,” he said to break the silence.

“Say one more nice thing and I’m going to smash all your truffles,” Byleth responded faintly. She was trying to remember, were you supposed to grow out of teasing people when you liked them? Or was that an instinct that people never left behind?

Felix narrowed his eyes. “You’re a terrible kitchen manager. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were hired just to keep me in line.”

“That’s more like it.” She smirked at him before ducking her head back to her prep table where she was coolly outlining white chocolate steel to begin sculpting swords.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  [chapter song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7aDstrDMf0)   
> 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	3. take me to church

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> december

**Truff** : eggnog  
**Filling:** full-fat, stick-to-your-ribs homemade eggnog infused into a white chocolate ganache with the cheapest brandy on the shelf  
**Shell:** 64% dusted in nutmeg  
**Ideal palate:** love and squalor

Kyphon swiped at Felix’s nose and ran a sand-paper tongue along his chin. Little needle feet dug into his chest. Felix cracked one eye open. Kyphon was kind of a jerk; this situation would escalate to biting if he wasn’t fed soon.

Purple-tinged early light threw the shadows of fat snowflakes against the wall of Felix’s studio apartment. The mountains had decided to dump five inches of snow onto Felix’s day off.

A day off can go one of two ways: it’s either the only thing between Felix and madness; or it’s a waste of time. Coming off five days straight of overtime, unfinished tasks from the production board were burned into his retinas. Ghost words overlaid everywhere he looked:

[_] _3x flats peppermint ganache_  
[_] _steep lavender for honey-lav truffs_  
[_] _have Mercedes bake xtra shortbread_

First-things-first, Felix fed the cat and switched his phone to airplane mode so nothing would get through. Then, it was calisthenics and hand weights. He pulled his hair back into a messy ponytail and threw himself into his workout. He lifted his bodyweight, slowly, evenly, everything with a purpose.

When finished, he settled loosely on the floor in front of the laptop. It was set up on an old coffee table stolen from the culinary school dorms. Seven minutes until Byleth’s livestream. Kyphon settled into Felix’s lap and batted little paws at the loose fabric of his pants.

The stream started early, and Byleth looked tired. Light purple bags beneath her eyes, a little line at the corner of her mouth. “…I’ve taken a position with a local chocolatier through the holidays,” she was saying. “So I won’t be able to produce as many tutorials. Nothing will stop me from sending out my weekly recipes, though.” She leaned against the counter and twined her fingers together. “We have a few minutes before beginning if you have questions for me.”

You’re not supposed to meet your heroes. Felix knew his too well these days. He could see the hard edges that didn’t quite line up with the person he had expected her to be: the way she laughed at crude jokes; stories about boxing her way through highschool; and, perhaps her biggest offense, she was even prettier in person.

The thing was, once you knew a person, it became weird fantasizing about them. You don’t desecrate your friends. He at least wanted consent first, and there was no way he was asking for that. He imagined how that conversation would go,

_Hey Byleth, is it cool if when I watch your videos I also think about unbuttoning your chef coat and licking chocolate off your chest and…? Look, I know it sounds bad, but I promise you’re into it. In my mind, you’re really really into it._

He could already see the way her eyes would narrow at him—disgusted. No, that wasn’t an option. He had a better solution: another rep of calisthenics before bed.

Onscreen, the chat filled up with questions. _How do you temper white chocolate without seed?_ And _How to bring a ganache back from breaking?_ Felix wondered how hard it was for people to run their own search for these answers.

“…ganaches usually break from fat imbalance,” Byleth’s answer was practiced, bored. “Try gently whisking in a few drops of cold water…”

The chat filled up again, this time with _WATER?_ And, _You can’t add water to chocolate!_

“…water is taboo for pure and tempered chocolate,” Byleth explained, “not an emulsion like a ganache…”

While she talked, Felix watched her eyes scan the chat box for more questions. He found himself typing. The writing was automatic, like it was one of those therapy sessions Rodrigue had forced on him whenever he had gotten into fights at school.

 **@Manbun_420:** how is the snow treating you?

There was his question, more revealing than a dick pic among the _how do I infuse bla-bla-bla?_ ’s and _can I substitute coconut oil for bla-bla-bla?_ comments filling the chat.

She looked into the camera and light parentheses bracketed the corners of her mouth. Was that a hint of a smile?

“Hi @Manbun_420.” Her voice was exhausted, but the more she talked the more animated she became. “You probably know how stressful Winter can be in this industry. I like the snow, though. I like driving through it into the mountains and feeling like I’m tumbling in space. I like how the cold sky gets so clear you can see every star.”

She rested there for a moment. Then, her eyes flickered down from the camera to where the chat box was filling up with piggy-back comments. _What mountains do you live near?_ And, _Does snow inspire your artistry?_

She waved off the rest of the personal questions and Felix didn’t type anything else.

“Let’s get to work.” She refocused the camera to a wider view. Someone had hung candy-canes on shiny foil garlands from the tops of the kitchen cabinets, and there was a new picture on the refrigerator of herself eating ice cream with her dad at a hockey game.

She pulled out a pitcher of pale-yellow cream from the fridge. “As I said, it’s snowing outside where I am, so it’s time to teach you to make my favorite boozy truffle: eggnog. I’ve already made my own ‘nog, but you can use store-bought...”

— — —

**Truff:** hazelnut  
**Filling:** there’s literally nothing funny about calling hazelnuts ‘hazelbutts,’  
that is, until you’re rolling your thousandth truffle of the day  
and your coworker is candying their tenth batch of hazelbutts  
to make your damn hazelbutt nougat for your damn hazelbutt truffles,  
and it’s the twentieth or so time you’ve said the word hazelbutts out loud,  
and you start to giggle about it, and you can’t fucking stop  
**Shell:** 64% milk chocolate and a candied hazelbutt  
**Ideal palate:** punch-drunk exhaustion

Large wet snowflakes dropped past the chocolate shop windows to nest in white mounds on the sills. They floated from side to side on their way down before catching like burrs on every surface from outdoor dining tables to the fur-lined edge of Felix’s hood.

Footprints, crunched in the dense snow, led into the shop from three different directions. Long narrow bootprints that belonged to Mercedes were already covered by a fresh inch of powder. Felix had to do a double-take about the second set of bootprints. These belonged to Byleth’s snow-faring calf-high boots, and they already had a dusting of snow settled into them too. The third prints were recent from a set of sneakers belonging to Ashe.

Felix stomped his own bootprints into the snow as he pushed the door. The bell sounded comfortingly familiar overhead. Byleth looked up from restocking the truffle case, her minty ponytail floating over her shoulder. She had taken it upon herself to finish Felix’s opening tasks.

“You’re early.” His voice was thick with his first real words that morning.

She stepped back from the case and reached for a mug. The more Felix’s nose thawed in the warm shop, the more he could smell Mercedes’s spice cakes and Byleth’s Earl Grey latte dirtied with a shot of espresso.

“I had nothing better to do this morning,” she said. Then, she added quietly, “And I thought @Manbun_420 could use a break.”

He pushed down his hood, brushed snow off the shoulders of his leather jacket, and began unwinding a long teal scarf from around his neck. His cheeks were rubbed pink in the cold, and long dark hair fell around his shoulders. He looked at her expectantly, all sharp features and wild bright eyes.

Framed against windows of early-morning light and snow flutters, Byleth was finding herself in a sensual snow-globe. Just her and Felix, and if she shook it… She imagined him crossing behind the counter, and pushing her up against the back wall. No words, just his hand pulling her ponytail to force her face up to him, and her hands reaching in against the black satin lining of his leather jacket. …By the time those snow particles would settle back on the bottom of the globe, they could part and pretend nothing ever happened.

“He probably wouldn’t appreciate you talking about him like that.”

Her eyes snapped up. Was that a little smirk rising at the corner of one cold-bitten lip, like he knew what she was thinking?

“Like what? By using his very distinguished and not at all embarrassing username.” She watched him peel brown fur-lined gloves from his fingers, one hand at a time. As he did it, she heard him grumble, _as if Temper Demon is any better_. “I hope he’s enjoying this snowfall,” she added.

“Yeah,” he raised his head with the word, lips tipping upward. “I didn’t choose that username.”

“Let me guess, Sylvain?” With one arm hugging herself under her breasts, and the other tucking at her bangs, she realized, _Holy Sothis, I’m flirting!_

“It’s true.”

“Okay,” Byleth shrugged.

“Okay.” Felix ran a hand through his hair making some snowflakes fall from his bangs onto the doormat. She watched him walk through the retail space until he disappeared into the kitchen. Then, she let out a breath she forgot she was holding.

By the time Felix stepped out of the locker room with chef coat on and his hair up in that notorious bun, Byleth was standing at a workstation set up with her four half-built sculptures. She looked at them thoughtfully, hands wrapped around that dirty Earl Gray. 

Without opening to do, Felix could get right to work. He plugged the airbrush into the compressed nitrogen tank and began heating his cocoa butter paint. Meanwhile, Byleth ground chocolate in a food processor until it was malleable enough to mold and shape like modeling clay. It was time for her to work on the saints’ faces.

Faces are tricky, Felix knew. There’s a small margin between creating a recognizable likeness and something nightmarish. Skew the proportions or fuck up the symmetry, and good ole’ Saint Chicol would suddenly look like the Christmas Krampus coming into your home to steal children away in the night.

Of course, Byleth knew those pitfalls too; this wasn’t her first chocolate sculpture. She began with broad strokes and basic shapes. Details would come later, once she got the foundation right.

The shop filled in around them. Sylvain and Dorothea joined Ashe to deal with the waves of customers. Some filled truffle boxes, others picked up cake orders. Hilda had a steady stream of cakes to write on; she balked, then boasted, then grabbed a chocolate piping bag to swirl a perfect _Happy Birthday Bernadetta!_

Snow days tracked a unique clientele into White Clouds Chocolatier. Sun- and wind-burned ski bums in puffy jackets looked for hot cocoa. Digital nomads with cabin fever sought fresh locations for work. They liked the ambrosial smell of chocolate. They liked the atmosphere of a little shop with snow-globe windows. They even liked to eavesdrop on staff drama.

At times, even Sylvain needed a break from the front-of-house hustle. He popped back into the kitchen to restock some of Mercedes’s sugar cookies, which were decorated with royal icing to look like holiday gifts, glass ornaments, and Santa Clause faces.

“Wow, Chef,” Sylvain whistled passing by Byleth’s station as she fine-tuned details for the saints sculptures. “These weapons look so realistic! For chocolate, that is.” He admired the woodgrain of the spears and little imprint she had carved into the sword handles. “Hey Felix, have you seen these swords? They look like something from one of your samurai films.”

Felix jerked a nod. “I’ve seen them.” Once Sylvain went around to bug Mercedes, Felix added, “You should teach me to do that sometime.”

Felix took an early lunch, and by the time he returned, Byleth had moved off to Mercedes’s vacated station, a quiet exile in the back kitchen. It gave Hilda room to assemble a two-tiered nutcracker cake, which stood on the cake station, dressed in white buttercream, while a mound of red fondant waited to be rolled out.

Hilda herself came out of the walk-in fridge carrying a tub of French buttercream, caramel mousse, and a sheet tray of cake rounds. He’d offer to help but that was a trap. Hilda was an ant. She could carry eight-times her weight on her back. The moment you offered to help her, though, you would be doomed to repeat it forever. 

As soon as she saw Felix was back, she dumped all her cake stuff on her station and tried to force a red Santa cap onto his head. “We need this,” she bullied him through gritted teeth, “I need your picture for Instagram.” _No way!_ Felix was hissing and adamantly batting her away.

Byleth’s voice seemed to come from nowhere beside him, echoing into his battle frenzy as he held Hilda at bay. “Do you have lust—?“

 _“What?”_ He snapped. Turning, he found himself looking right into those bright green eyes looming at his shoulder. _“Lust?”_ He swallowed hard. She was wearing one of Hilda’s Santa hats, and the red fabric clashed gloriously against her hair.

“Luster dust,” Byleth said. “You know, the edible glitter pigments. I think they’re in that drawer right there.” 

Felix spazzed backward from Byleth. “Oh, that’s what you said.”

Confused, Byleth pointed, as if he didn’t know exactly where he kept the luster dust. “Can you pass me the silver?”

Meanwhile, Hilda’s eyebrows were flying high enough to disappear under the white trim of her own Santa cap. Felix opened a drawer coated in sparkling glitter from about forty small pots of different colored edible pigments. He handed her the silver and then rubbed his brow.

“You, um, just got sparkles on your face,” Byleth said.

“What?” Felix touched his face again. His fingers left behind another streak of sparkles running down his jaw. Then he spotted his glittery fingers and realized what was happening. His eyes winged huge, and a pink flush hit his cheeks to make a very becoming base layer for the glitter.

Byleth looked like she was about to pick up a rag and start wiping him down. Then she thought better of it, “Uhhhhh… Nevermind.” She bailed to the back kitchen, minty ponytail disappearing last around the corner.

A devilish smile spread across Hilda’s face: “Well that was awkward. Stay right there, that glitter’s better than any Santa Hat.” Felix hissed and twisted his back to her before she could get her phone out for the picture.

“What? What’s awkward?” Annette came bouncing around the blind corner and almost tumbled over Hilda’s prep table and right into the Nutcracker’s face. “Phewww, that was close. But what’s awkward?” 

“Felix is all tongue-tied about the lusty dust,” Hilda whispered loudly. Lysethia who was checking her cakes in the oven peered around at everyone.

“I am not,” Felix grunted. He rubbed his face, heedlessly spreading the luster dust across both of his cheeks.

“Felix,” Annette said, “you have something right there on your face.” Felix used a corner of his wet rag to rub at it some more. The sparkles only spread.

“Who’s he lusty about?” Lysethia asked.

“The new Kitchen Manager,” Hilda said keenly. “I thought you said she was a ‘home-baking mercenary’.”

“Yeah, didn’t you call her show ‘amateur hour’?” Annette pressed.

“Shut up.”

“Felix,” Sylvain whistled as he passed into the back kitchen for another cookie restock. “What is that glitter on your face? It looks good, man, really brings out the sparkles in your eyes.”

“My eyes are not sparkling!” Felix ground out through gritted teeth.

Just then Byleth came back around from the back kitchen. She took one look at Felix’s disco-ball of a face and started laughing so hard she nearly dropped her half-sheet tray of finely detailed chocolate robes and armor. “What have you done? You look like you’re about to go to a rave.”

“Don’t,” Felix growled.

“Come on, into the locker room.” Byleth grabbed a bottle and a rag and pushed him forward.

“No, don’t clean it up!” Hilda called out from behind her tall cake and massive 22-inch piping bag. “Embrace the sparkles!”

Once inside the locker room, Byleth was pouring from the bottle onto the rag. “Coconut oil?” Felix asked warily.

“Water spreads it around. This will remove it. Close your eyes.” He reluctantly squinted as Byleth leaned toward him with the towel. He could feel her face very close to his, almost nose to nose, as she dabbed at his cheek. “You’re much less intimidating when you’re sparkling,” Byleth said.

He grunted.

“See?” He cracked one eye to see the rag she was showing him. The corner that she had used on his face was covered in fine glittering powder.

“I can get the rest.” He grabbed the towel from her hand. As she prepared to leave, he said, “ _You_ think _I’m_ intimidating?”

“Isn’t that what you want?” she asked simply.

— — —

**Truff:** checkerboard praline  
**Filling:** hazelbutt pralinade  
**Shell:** milk chocolate square decorated with a checkerboard design  
**Ideal palate:** when you’re pretty sure that you’re into someone  
but instead of just saying so, you challenge them to a bet to rub their face in the defeat  
and your best friend gives you a look of, _why are you being such a sociopath?_  
and there’s really only one answer, _the spirit of competition_

Sagging into the threadbare cushions of Jeralt’s lousy yellow couch, Claude was flipping the little bit of receipt paper between his fingers. Byleth perched on the couch arm and watched him press more creases into the already tattered missive.

‘If you ever want a rematch,’ Sylvain’s handwriting scrawled, followed by seven very real numerical digits. 

“What do you think that’s supposed to mean?” Claude asked for the fifteenth time.

The real question wasn’t what Sylvain meant by giving Claude his phone number. The real question was, what did Claude want it to mean?

Claude fell into the intersection of a dozen beautiful things. He possessed secrets—about curried cuisines, and household poisons, artificial neural networks, and chess-playing automata. Byleth was just proud to have known him long enough for a grasp on just how little she knew about him.

The previous fourteen times, Byleth had humored him with a good-natured, _I should think that’s obvious; he wants you to call_. For this fifteenth time, she switched tracks: “I never know what Sylvain means by anything. What do _you_ think it’s supposed to mean?”

There it was, the invitation that Claude was searching for.

“You don’t suppose,” Claude said beginning to lead her for a ride, “that he’s the red-head from that regional chess tournament I lost back in highschool.” Byleth bit a smile about the way he phrased it. The one he lost… the only one.

“I remember that tournament. It was a nail-biter.” She rolled her eyes into the back of her head as if trying to recall the scene by looking directly into her brain. Claude hated when she did stuff like that. “I guess that guy did have red hair.”

“I’m sure it was him.”

“So call him,” but even as she said it, Claude already had his phone out and half the number typed in. He raised it to his head, nerves back to their usual steel.

“Name’s Claude,” he said easily, “You beat me in chess eight years ago and I want a rematch.” Something on the other side of the phone made Claude grin. “How about tonight?”

Claude shifted his gaze to Byleth. “I’m at Byleth’s place. I can text you the address.” As he listened, his eyes went wide as coins. “Yeah, you can bring your friend.” Claude’s brows knitted together, “Tell him he can watch Kurosawa films anytime.”

Byleth’s eyes squinted: _what friend was this now?_

“Good, see you soon,” Claude poked the phone to hang up and began typing Byleth’s address into the text messenger.

“Tell me,” Byleth growled looking down at her mismatched knee-high socks and the worn-out leggings she was wearing under a pair of running shorts. “You did not just invite my coworkers over.”

“I kind of did…” Claude said. Byleth leapt off the couch like it was made of lava. “Hey, where are you going? You don’t have to change, Teach. It’s just casual.”

As Byleth hopped down the hall trying to pull off her socks at a run, Jeralt poked his head out of his home office. “Did I hear right? Did you invite boys over?”

Claude nodded and gulped. A grown-ass adult for years now, and Byleth’s dad could still intimidate the fuck out of him sometimes.

Jeralt laughed, “I can’t remember the last time you two had boys over at this place. Don’t worry, I’ll stay out of your hair.” Claude relaxed as Jeralt left the room laughing with a rumble of, _must be good if she’s worried about her jogging shorts, that kid doesn’t dress up for anybody…_

Byleth had managed to pull on a pair of black jeans, smelling unmistakably of chocolate, right before the doorbell rang. On the stoop, Sylvain grinned crookedly in those same tight button-down and fitted burgundy pants that he normally wore. He walked through the door like he’d been to Byleth’s house a dozen times while Felix loitered on the doorstep in his leather jacket. Felix seemed to be very interested in the door trim, staring up and away as Byleth tried to wave him in.

“Don’t make this weird,” she pleaded quietly. He finally looked at her, nodded enough that his ponytail bounced slightly, and passed into the house.

Inside, Claude was already turning on the charm. Felix might have looked frosty as all hell, but there was no ice to break between Claude and Sylvain. They bantered like they had known each other for years. 

Sensing the desperate need for liquid courage, Byleth led Felix away from the twinkling Christmas tree with her embarrassing childhood ornaments—all chocolate truffles and boxing gloves—and into the kitchen.

“This is where you film,” he said slowly. The setting was uncannily familiar, from the sports brackets taped on the cabinets to the chocolate-work tools arrayed across the countertops.

“Yeah,” she said, “I live here with my dad.” Felix had the urge to linger in the kitchen. There was something cozy about this space that he had watched Byleth navigate in dozens of videos. How many times had he thought about leaning her up against those countertops and snagging kisses from her open mouth? 

Before he realized it, Byleth was next to him shoving glass-bottled beers into each of his hands. She grabbed two in her own and shooed him out to the living room, asking, “Do you think we need snacks?”

“People who snack have no willpower.”

Byleth couldn’t help but laugh at him as she led the way from the kitchen. Already, Sylvain and Claude had her old chess set out on the coffee table and they were discussing the tournament.

“…I _was_ serious about it,” Sylvain grinned. “That was my senior year of high school, my last chance to kick ass.”

Byleth jumped to perch on the couch arm. “Eight years ago at the highschool league Regional Chess Tournament,” she announced in her spot-on sport’s commentator voice. “It came down to two boys from rival schools in these foothills.” She handed a beer to Claude. “At stake, one absurdly large chess trophy shaped like a knight. Only one would win.”

Byleth raised her beer as if toasting. The rest clinked their bottles against hers, Felix albeit reluctantly.

“It was the bottom of the first half, tensions electrical in the air, and the mysterious redhead pulled out his Gautier Knights Stride gambit. Suddenly, this foxy redhead had Claude’s king surrounded and his queen tied up in an engagement with a roguish rook.”

Claude looked up, impressed at how well she remembered the match. To be fair, he had gone over the defeat a hundred times with her afterward.

“You’re missing an important detail,” Felix drawled. “Sylvain wasn’t a mysterious contender. He was the hometown hero.”

“Please!” She turned on him. “Claude was the reigning champ. Just because he didn’t grow up in this town—”

“Sylvain’s side of the competition was full. He was clearly the favorite.”

“We were a scrappy rag-tag group, and we liked it that way!” Byleth punched her beer in the air so fiercely it bubbled up and almost spilled.

Her eyes dared Felix to say something more while the chess players set their pieces. He only smirked and shrugged. Blinking lights from the Christmas tree reflected off his jacket and shone an oddly domestic light on his usual sharp-edged posture.

Byleth took a breath.

“Wow, that was around this time of year, wasn’t it?” she asked Claude. “I remember helping you practice right here in the den, and Uncle Alois came through in his Santa suit.”

Claude laughed and brushed back his hair. “He gave us those play swords for Christmas that year. You kicked my ass with a foam Zelda Master Sword.”

Sylvain lounged back with his head supported in his hands. “That’s right, it was the holidays. Rodrigue was cranking up the Mannheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra while Dimitri and I took over the kitchen table to practice.”

 _Hmph_. Felix relaxed enough to lean against the couch arm across from Byleth. “Glenn was bitching that he didn’t have enough room to prep his _duck a l’orange_ or whatever.”

“The Julia Child phase,” Sylvain comiserated.

“Glenn was so stupid about that.” Felix laughed, a quick sharp cackle. “Kept shoving food down our throats. And Dimitri forced you to play chess until 3 am, insisting you had ‘one more win between you and everlasting glory’.”

“How’s that everlasting glory working out for you?” Claude asked cheekily.

“Well, I brew coffee by day, sling cocktails by night, and make my pocket-cash from online poker. But,” Sylvain winked, “it brought me here, so...”

Claude had a smile behind his hand, “Another game then? This one determines the real winner.”

Sensing an opportunity, Byleth sat up straight and looked at Felix. “My guy is gonna kick your guy’s ass.”

“ _Tch_ , this again,” Felix said, bored.

“And when he does,” she continued, undeterred, “you have to come cater the church banquet with me on Christmas Eve.”

Felix looked away from the bright lights of the Christmas tree. He weighed his options:

 **Pro** — it got him out of Rodrigue’s absurd Christmas Eve traditions

 **Con** — he hated in-person catering

 **Pro** — it meant spending time with Byleth 

**Con** — it meant spending time with Byleth

“Fine, but if Sylvain wins, you’re doing my opening for a week.”

“Easy! You’re on.”

Despite their ardent betting, neither Byleth nor Felix had any interest in watching their friends play chess. They found themselves sitting on the brick fireplace next to the Christmas tree separately brainstorming conversation starters that wouldn’t have them talking about work.

“—chocolate?” Felix’s voice was a low growl. Byleth had missed most of what he said, caught up in her own thoughts of how this awkwardly felt like a double-date setup, and how devastatingly hot Felix looked in his pedestrian clothes, and that question that had been nagging at her since her last livestream about how he watched her show...

“Sorry, what’s that?”

“How did you get into chocolate?”

“I needed something to do with my hands. It’s less wear and tear than following in my father’s footsteps and boxing.” Felix looked up at the boxing metals on the wall and a floating shelf covered in trophies. “I got into pastry and specialized from there. But what about you?”

“My whole family is culinary. The only question was what my specialty would be. I was methodical which led me to pastry and confections, and in culinary school I was pigeon-holed into chocolate for being…” He tried not to say it in Glenn’s voice “…a perfectionist.” He trailed off and his face fell.

“Felix?”

He shrugged her off. Byleth finished her beer and set the empty bottle down on the hearth.

She reached over him and grabbed one of the candy-canes from the tree. She began poking him with the long end. “What is it?” she asked. _Poke_. “Spill.”

“Don’t poke me,” he growled.

“Then tell me,” _poke_ , “what’s up?”

He looked up to see her wide green eyes all trained on him. She was asking sincerely. And that made it even worse. He grabbed a candy-cane from the tree. He jabbed it at Byleth to poke her back, but she blocked it with her own candy-cane.

Again, he poked at her. Again, she parried. That determined expression crossed her face.

He slashed at her and she blocked. She slashed at him with the candy-cane and he dodged his hand away. Thinking him distracted, she jabbed toward his shoulder to poke him again, but he blocked her.

His own candy-cane hooked around hers. He attempted to wedge it out of her hand, but she held tight. “You’re using the wrong side,” she said.

“I wasn’t aware there were rules.”

She pulled her candy-cane free and clashed with his. Strike after strike, they found their way to each other blocked.

The final blow of his candy-cane came against hers. _Crrrruunncchhh_. They saw shattered, red-ribboned splinters under the plastic wrapping.

“You broke my sword,” she said, shaking hair from her eyes.

“Splintered it.” Felix made a seated lunge sideways to grab her candy-cane from her. She swiftly tossed it to her other hand. Then, she leaned away from him and raised it above both of their heads. He would practically have to climb up her to get it.

Felix smirked. Instead, he settled back down and twirled his undamaged candy-cane around a finger. It had both red and green stripes, and it flashed like a pinwheel as he spun it. Bored, he stopped twirling and held it out. What was he supposed to do with this candy? Now that they had stopped sparring, there was no way in hell he was going to eat it.

In a flash like a conductor’s wand, Byleth brought her candy-cane blade back down. She beat it against his:

Once on the right. It _cracked!_ Again on the left. It _shattered!_ A third time back on the right, and her cane broke his in half, wrapper and all. 

She waved the victorious candy-cane exuberantly in the air, “I won.”

“That’s not fair! I had already won!” Felix looked murderous.

“I didn’t say ‘I yield,’ so we were still fighting. Face it, I won,” she insisted. “You have to tell me now. What were you pouting about?”

“It’s just…” He brushed bangs from his face and side-eyed her to make sure she wasn’t looking directly at him. “Sometimes I get this huge, eggplant-sized feeling that everything is going to go wrong. And it will be my fault. And I’ll be put so far under I won’t know how to get out.”

She stuck the broken end of the candy-cane in her mouth. “That’s called anxiety,” she said around the stick of sugar. Then, she rested her jaw on her palm. “We all get like that sometimes.”

It was hard to believe. Byleth handled stress without sweat. She never seemed to have that obsessive voice in the back of her head that what she was doing wasn’t good enough. _I don’t want to fail_ , he thought, _especially not with you around._

She put her hand on his shoulder and waited for him to flinch away. He didn’t though. All he did was look at her skeptically. “I’m going to grab another beer. Want one?” Felix shrugged. She took that as a ‘yes’.

Claude was lurking by the fridge taking a breather from the chess match. “Have you seen _him?_ ” He asked Byleth all wide-eyed. “Have you seen _his face?_ ”

“It’s a good face,” she said assuming they were talking about Sylvain. “Be cool, Claude.” She just wished she could take her own advice.

Claude handed a beer into each of her hands and grabbed another two. “We’re in the endgame now.”

“Whose endgame, though?”

“Mine, all mine.” He grinned, puckish and self-satisfied.

Byleth smiled smugly at Felix as he showed up at her side. “Looks like I’m taking you to church,” she said.

She handed him the beer and knocked an arm around his shoulders. You know, a shoulder hug—normal bro behavior for when you’ve just beat someone out of a bet. Felix blushed brighter than the gaudy winged cherubs hanging from the Christmas tree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  [chapter song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVjiKRfKpPI)  
> 
> 
> Take care and thanks for reading!


	4. silent night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> christmas eve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The super talented Sayl has [illustrated a scene](https://twitter.com/ShadowSayl/status/1340126909607403520) from the second chapter of this fic, and Byleth looks smokin'. Also be sure to check out their other artwork while you're at it--it's all so beautiful!
> 
> The last section of this chapter is NSFW. If you're not interested in that, then stop reading at the section that begins with the cranberry mint gin trailblazer truffle (an excellent holiday cocktail, by the way, if you're still looking for one).

** Truff: ** peanut butter  
** Filling: ** a basic milk chocolate ganache that uses PB for fat  
** Shell: ** 64%  
** Ideal palate: ** some kids leave cookies for Santa, others leave him a cold beer.  
it takes a very particular household to leave him peanut butter truffles,  
and Santa could never be cool about it because ~~Jeralt~~ Santa fucking loves peanut butter,  
so he would run into the Kid’s room yelling,  
“Kid, these chocolates are delicious!”  
which would wake the Kid right up,  
then the two of them would stay up all night watching boxing movies until Christmas morning

If Byleth was intending to sneak down the hallway unperceived, then she shouldn’t have been trying to pull her leggings up at the same time. As it were, she stumbled and smashed her elbow into the electronic singing bass on the wall, which in a fit of holiday spirit, her father had adorned with a Santa hat.

The bass opened and closed its mouth. The Santa hat wobbled precariously. And from the shitty speakers of the wooden fake fish mount, Otis Redding sang the joys of sitting on docks. All the while, Byleth spewed an unworthy back-beat of, “Shit! Fuck!” That was for hitting her funny bone on the fish. “Fuck! Great Mother Sothis!” That was for a stubbed toe.

“Hey Kid!” Jeralt called. “Did that fish do you in? Or are you coming for a beer?”

“Can’t drink.” From the kitchen, Byleth peered over the half-wall into the living room to where Jeralt sat with Uncle Alois on the couch. They were sorting through photo portraits of Alois and his family spread across the coffee table. Some were already in frames, Christmas gifts for Jeralt. “I have work tonight.”

“Hey,” Alois called to Byleth when he saw her, “Knock knock—”

“Alois,” she groaned, pouring an afternoon mug of coffee. “Wouldn’t your seven-year-old daughter be a better audience for this?” Byleth walked into the living room and picked one of the family photos from the table.

“Unfortunately, she’s already learned the words, ‘dad joke,’ so time is limited with her too.”

Byleth grinned at the photos. Most displayed the little family in formal wear. However, there was a short stack of glossy candid shots that had captured the impish grin of a square-faced girl while she banged a foam great axe against her father’s shoulder LARPing in the park.

“Okay okay, one more,” Alois said, while Jeralt popped another beer. “This one’s gonna  _ sleigh _ you.”

Byleth looked dubious.

“What’s a parent’s favorite Christmas carol?”

Byleth shrugged.

Jeralt scratched his head.

“SILENT NIGHT,” Alois shouted, enthusiastic to land a punch-line for once.

Jeralt grimaced like his ears were ringing. “In your household? Good luck with that.” But no one could miss the way he was clutching one of the framed photos and scanning the wall for a place to hang it among his and Byleth’s boxing medals.

“Byleth, come on just a little laugh?” She shook her head, smiling slightly. “Your daughter is  _ coooollld _ ,” Alois complained before shooting Byleth a wink. “Well I’ll be off, the little tyke thinks she’s going to stay up all night to see if Santa comes, and you know that’s my cue.”

They waved him out.

“Work tonight?” Jeralt asked before popping a Christmas-gift peanut butter truffle into his mouth. “With that kid who was over here? The one with all the… hair?”

“You  _ were _ spying!” She slapped his shoulder. “It’s nothing, just casual. I mean not even casual, cause it’s nothing at all.”

“Nothing, huh?”

Jeralt was giving Byleth  _ that look _ . She hated  _ that look _ . It was the  _ I wish your mother was here _ look.

“Well,” he said finally. “If it’s a  _ you _ problem, I support you one-hundred percent. If it’s a  _ him _ problem, I bet I could take him.”

“I don’t know... he’s pretty strong,” she teased, “and not over-the-hill. Besides—” Byleth cut in again before Jeralt could get out his usual refrain of  _ watch who you’re calling old _ , “It’s nothing because it’s a nothing problem.”

“So,” Jeralt said, relieved to drop the subject. “We can watch  _ Rocky _ until you have to go?”

“Have you ever thought about watching samurai movies?” Byleth asked quietly.

“Samurai movies?” Jeralt peered at her as if she had just sprouted a second head. “What the hell?”

“No reason.” Byleth dodged away from his stare. “Just something new.”

“We could...” Jeralt seemed about to choke. He swigged his stout. “We could try it,” he said, finally. However, the grumpy scowl didn’t leave his face: “I bet you want to invite that boy over for it, too?”

“No way! What?—No way! Just put on  _ Rocky _ , dad. It’s Christmas, after all.”

— — —

** Truff: ** cappuccino  
** Filling: ** pour that espresso overdose straight into your ganache  
** Shell: ** dark for a dry capp, milk for a wet capp, or white for a latte  
** Ideal palate: ** it’s going to be a long night

Mouth-watering aromas were sneaking through the doorframe of the Fraldarius house. On the front stoop, Byleth found herself sniffing the air like a stray dog staring into the window of a picturesque family enjoying their holiday feast. It made the pizza and beer she’d eaten with Jeralt seem like mere peasant stuff.

The truth, it turns out, was a bit more complicated.

Felix opened the door. A month’s worth of blue-black beard grew along his jaw which strangely hadn’t been there less than 48 hours ago. His eyes were also bright blue. And he had cut his hair?!

Byleth jumped in shock.

“Expecting someone else?” Same flat mouth, same flat voice, same sardonic tone. “I’m guessing Felix didn’t mention you’d be picking him up at my house.” The man held out his hand: “I’m Glenn, the brother. You must be Byleth. Come in.”

Byleth shook the hand gratefully. Meanwhile, an insistently excitable corgi wiggled his whole butt in greeting and blocked her way through the door.

“Loog, back up,” Glenn growled. Loog reluctantly gave Byleth enough room to pass inside. Then, he followed on her heels until she knelt to pat his big ears. “Felix will be down in a minute. Can I get you anything?”

Byleth sniffed the air again. That was definitely a duck roast and the smell of cooking cherries. Rosemary on a fish platter, thyme in the vegetables, fennel in the stew. She shared a meaningful look with Loog:  _ I would eat everything in that kitchen _ . Loog bumped her hand with his head:  _ Every day here is gastronomic torture. _

“No thanks.” Byleth stood, intending to wait by the entrance. Glenn watched her slyly while a door opened and Sylvain came ambling into the hallway. Through the open doorway, she could hear a recording that sounded suspiciously like herself.

_ …measure your powdered sugar, cocoa, and marshmallows into each shell… _

Fuck, no! That was definitely her five-minute video on hot cocoa bombs. Her eyes grew roughly to the size of your average sugar cookie. “Is that…?” she was about to ask, but before she could get the rest of the words out, Sylvain was already wrapping her in a hug: “Merry Christmas, Chef!” She looked slightly winded when he finally released her. “Come meet the fam!”

A blond woman had entered the atrium and looped her arm into Glenn’s. Her expression was a complicated combination of:  _ Pleased to meet you. _ \+  _ I should check on the duck. _ \+  _ Let me know if Felix and Sylvain are too much. _ \+  _ Gosh, I could eat that whole duck all by myself. _ \+  _ I won’t, of course. Food is better shared. + But I could _ .

“I’m Ingrid,” she said. “We’ve all been looking forward to meeting  _ you _ .”

Byleth’s ears burned red as she heard the closing theme of her Youtube show from the other room.

They were all staring at her.

Did all kitchen managers get this kind of welcome in the Fraldarius house?

“Thank you,” Byleth said awkwardly. “Something smells good...”

As if she had broken some sort of spell, Glenn started rattling off the holiday feast menu faster than an auctioneer spits out bids. “The rabbit skewers are daytime appetizers with the jalapeno poppers...”

“Felix’s favorites,” Sylvain cut in.

“The duck will be ready for tomorrow night, and I’m trying something new: foie gras on a grilled apple crostini. Serrano pepper spiced fish…”

“…if you ever need to bribe Felix—,” Sylvain added cheekily.

Just then, Felix himself had begun to make his way down the stairs. Another blue-haired man was following him. This one had that perpetual look of exhaustion above his primped suit. A thin mustache and beard surrounding his mouth, and his blue eyes were sharp like Felix’s. His dad, she realized.

Their argument carried down the stairs. “And,” Felix was saying, ”how many holidays have you missed to work in some kitchen? I’ve been here most of the day already.”

“It’s a family holiday, Felix. It’s tradition.”

“Screw tradition. You won’t miss me for the last two hours.”

Rodrigue was running his hand through his hair when he noticed Byleth still standing at the entrance. Always loath to make a scene, he relented. “Fine fine, Felix. You can go.”

“If you need to stay with your family…” Byleth began. Her voice carried it more than she had meant it to, and she was uncomfortably finding all eyes on her again. “I can get someone else—“

“—No,” Felix cut through, “I’m coming.”

At the foot of the stairs, he stopped and looked her over. For the past month, he’d hardly seen her in anything but black jeans and aprons. Now, she was cinched tight in her winter coat with those floral tights and a cute pair of pumps that gave her a little height. Felix felt his stomach do a flip.

She gave him the ‘rescue me’ eyes. He gave her a fraction of a smile.

“Be back in a millisecond.” He trotted off for the rest of his things.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Rodrigue said, clearly still stuck on the fight a moment ago. “So you’re his new kitchen manager?” He had a pleasant smile, kind face, tired eyes.

Byleth nodded.

“He’s an odd boy, but he likes you.”

Byleth’s expression didn’t shift but her face colored pink to the roots of her hair. Shooting her a pitying look, Glenn began to lead his dad away, “Come on, we’re not done in the kitchen.”

Felix rushed back through the house. He scowled around at everyone, grumpily promised to see them all the next day, and jerked his head at Byleth. They disappeared through the door like two prisoners making a jail-break.

Byleth’s car was about half her age. It always sputtered to life like something reluctantly waking from a long sleep, and the same CD had been jammed in its player for eight years. She went through cycles of loving and hating it.

Four carefully wrapped chocolate statues lounged across the backseat along with pastry boxes and catering tools. If Felix thought he was inured to the smell of chocolate, that car changed his mind. With the sculptures back there, it would have been overpowering if not for the peppermint air freshener. Or was that Byleth’s shampoo?

“You could have stayed,” she said, barely audible over the revving defrost. He shrugged. She pulled out, quiet and resigned, until they made their way onto the highway. “I looked it up, you’ve been supporting my channel for two years.”

Felix surveyed the car for exits. It had all the typical doors, which were promising enough if they weren’t shooting down the freeway with Byleth’s lead foot on the gas.

“That’s true,” he said finally.

“You never said—”

“Pastry is a small world.” He checked his phone just because. “Everyone pays attention to everyone else.”

“That’s true.” Why should she think she was special? He paid a little money to see her reveal all her trade secrets. It really was nothing.

— — —

** Truff: ** peppermint  
** Filling: ** mint jam over a layer of peppy-infused ganache  
** Shell: ** 72% dark, garnished with crushed candy-cane bits  
** Ideal palate: ** it’s the menthol in peppermint that makes your mouth feel cold.  
it sends out ions that the brain interprets with tiny electrical pulses,  
and those minuscule shocks are translated into artificial coldness.

temperature-wise nothing changes, but sensation is everything

if you feel it, does that make it real?

The Church of Seiros was a large vaulted-ceiling affair with loose morals about drinking and wide galleries for dancing. Guests tended to leave empty-pocketed of their ‘donations’—because the Church collected heirlooms and relics like a magpie—but delightfully tipsy all the same.

Byleth was gingerly carrying a gold-dusted, pure chocolate sculpture of Saint Chicol through the wide monastery double-doors, when a man with green hair and a chinstrap beard the color of healthy sea-weed stopped her. He frowned into his clipboard and ran his finger down a deliveries list before giving the statue a searching look.

“Is that Chicol?” He asked. “Shouldn’t he be taller?”

Byleth bristled. “Not according to my reference.”

“And broader-chested.”

“The statue isn’t muscly enough for you?—”

“Seteth!” A small girl bounced up next to them wearing an ornate empire-waist dress and spiral-coiled green hair. “Look!” she called, pointing to Felix, “it’s Saint Cethleann, but made of chocolate! Doesn’t she look lovely?”

“I see that, Flayn.” Looking shiftily from Byleth to Felix, Seteth hastily waved them through. As they passed, he turned back to Flayn, “We need to check on the choir. That Manuela is already three sheets to the wind...”

It was a simple delivery: four sculptures, dozens of cupcakes, truffles, and assorted bite-size pastries. Hair back, gloves on, Byleth and Felix morphed into robotic sweets-arranging machines. They turned the once stark dessert table into a lavish bouquet of shiny chocolates and colorful icing treats.

Arranged in tiers and framed in deep green holly, the display looked like it had just stepped out of a catering magazine. (So, if that green-haired churchman wanted to come by with more criticisms of how her Saint Chicol wasn’t ripped enough, Byleth was ready to tell him exactly where to stick it.)

Byleth was brushing a last layer of golden luster dust across everything right as the doors opened for the guests. It didn’t take long before the musicians started playing carols, and chattering began to fill the room. They had just enough time to stop at the bar for cocktails—bone-dry champagne for Felix, spiked peppermint cocoa for Byleth—before their evening became a whirlwind of handing out small plates of pastries and cakes.

Felix was trying to shove a cupcake at a pair of pendulously bouncing tits, presumably to ward them off the way one might brandish a crucifix at a vampire, when the woman in question turned her head to the side and hiccuped into her champagne glass. She turned back, grinned right up to her bright orange eyeshadow, and said, “Oh no thanks, hon, have to watch my figure. I’d take  _ you  _ covered in chocolate, though, if old Hanneman wasn’t here.”

Felix scowled bloody-murder while a gray-haired man beside the woman, presumably Hanneman, stuttered, “Now see here, Manuela…”

Byleth’s mouth dropped open to a surprised O, and she grabbed the cupcake from Felix before he had a chance to wind up and pitch it right into the woman’s cleavage. “Oh, you too, honey,” Manuela was sloshing her glass at Byleth now. “One more of these bad boys and I’d take both of you home.”

She laughed musically at their startled expressions. “They say the church is stuffy, but this open bar is— _ hic _ —very nice. Keeps ole Seteth from being too prickly about that time I asked him if the carpets match the drapes. Didn’t— _ hic _ —take it very well at all—”

“Manuela, honestly…” The gray man tugged nervously at a mustache so encrusted with wax he might have dipped his face in a beehive. He fixed Byleth with a decidedly too-sober stare, “My dear, is that hair natural?”

Felix felt his, albeit shallowly buried, protective instinct rise in him.

“Why with your genetic structure, you could be—”

Felix’s hand began scrunching into a tight fist.

But before he could do anything to get them both fired, Manuela came unwittingly to the rescue: “—They’re hot  _ 20-somethings _ , Hanneman, they don’t want to hear about  _ genetics _ ! Let’s go find more cham _ pagne _ .”

“You’ve had quite enough...” Hanneman said as they left the table.

Byleth and Felix shared a look:  _ What the fuck? _

Felix raised an eyebrow:  _ I think I just saved you from becoming some creep’s genetics experiment. _

Byleth bit her lip:  _ I think I just saved you from becoming some cougar’s midnight snack. _

Felix tapped his glass looking like he had just stepped off the field of battle.

“ _ I _ need a refill after that.”

“Agreed.”

Rather than taking shifts, Byleth and Felix left for the bar together. They dodged dancers, drunk scholars, and sober nuns.

None of that was distracting enough, though, to keep Felix’s focus from the ridges of Byleth’s shoulder blades under her black silk blouse. He watched her skirt swish around her thighs, every step lifting it slightly.

She turned her head to look back at him. “Felix? Your face is bright red.”

Caught in the act!

He dragged his eyes away from the space between Byleth’s thighs. “It’s hot in here,” he said, swallowing thickly.

She cast another glance back at him. It was a lofty stone monastery. No matter how many bodies you pressed into it, it would never be exactly  _ warm _ , much less  _ hot _ .

Predictably, the bar was the rowdiest station at the banquet. Bodies pressed against the wooden counter vying for the lavender-haired bartender’s attention. Slinging drinks with one hand and pouring champagne with the other, the bartender looked up, saw Byleth and Felix standing together, and already started pouring without re-asking their order.

Service-worker to service-worker reciprocity, sometimes you get to skip to the front of the line.

“Above you, friend,” Yuri called as he pushed their drinks across the counter. Byleth and Felix looked up at the same time. Mistletoe hung by a ribbon from a shelf of glassware above their heads.

A looming challenge to all that passed beneath.

Fuck.

Felix’s mouth went dry. His hand shook slightly as he reached out to grab his glass.

Byleth looked over at him. She smiled her rare impish grin and prepared to step away from the mistletoe zone.

They could ignore it.

But.

Felix’s hands were quick, quicker than his second thoughts. One hand wrapped Byleth’s upper arm to keep her from turning away. The other rose to cup her chin in his fingers, his thumb ran across her jaw, melting away her silly grin.

Felix’s face rushed toward her. His lips slid against her sticky gloss and the remnants of sugary cocktails until they found the right traction. Something burned in his chest, satisfied and self-congratulatory. He had one shot, one chance, one Christmas miracle. He slipped his head sideways and deepened the kiss.

Both Byleth’s hands pressed on his chest. Instead of reeling him in closer, though, they planted themselves and pushed. He found himself being firmly thrust away from her.

Byleth’s face was pink from hairline to chin. “Okay,” she said, backing further away, “cool.”

He took another step back, face scrunched. His eyes burned into her neck, unable to look higher than her chin.  _ Cool? _

“Cool cool,” she was saying under her breath, “that’s interesting… You make an interesting point...”

Sometimes you take risks, and you’re okay with failing.

For Felix, this was not one of those times.

He grabbed his champagne glass, downed it in one gulp, and stalked away.

Byleth stood shocked and abandoned while her spiked cocoa grew tepid on the bar.

From her periphery, Manuela and her orange eyeshadow zoomed into view. “Ohhh,” she purred, “If you’re going to turn that down, can I have him?”

“I have work to do,” Byleth said, grabbing her luke-warm cocoa and preparing to walk off.

“That was cold, even by my standards.” Manuela surveyed Byleth over the backs of her fingernails. “And  _ I’ve _ never gone on a second date.” Byleth had to wonder if that was by choice. “So what’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem.” Byleth touched her lips, heartbeat still pumping fast. “He’s a good guy. But these things never go well, and…”

_ Dating is a stupid game. Lovers get mad when you aren’t emotionally involved. So you fake it ‘til you make it. You get yourself hooked, a fish out of water, in all that love shit. But the more emotionally available you become, the more bored they get. They cheat; you cheat. You leave; they leave. It’s better not to get attached… _

“And?” Manuela pressed.

“We work together.”

Manuela shot Byleth the almost-maternal tough-love expression that Byleth so desperately needed. “I’d get over it, if I were you, hon. He looks like a good lay.”

Byleth had to agree. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, his kiss… His kiss had sent a jolt right through her core. And the way he had walked away? It made her want to wrap her hands around his shoulders and pull him back against her.

He was currently serving angry sugar buzzes to guests with head jerks so fierce that his hair was falling out of his pony-tail. It made her want to push him away from the pastry table, wrap her hand around the shambled ponytail, and pull his face down to her again.

_ Dating is a stupid game _ .

They found ways to avoid each other the whole rest of the evening.

Byleth wrapped up in the back kitchen. “Look,” She muttered to an assortment of spatulas as she sprayed them with scalding water. “A relationship would ruin me. They always do.”

_ But _ , rebutted an offset spatula with a stubborn glob of icing on its handle, _ Felix is cute and smokin' hot... No one says you have to fall for him. _

“But we work together,” she grumbled.

_ A likely excuse _ , a chocolaty truffle fork snarked at her.

“I like him, okay? I do.”

_ You’re an idiot _ , bitched the truffle fork, as she secured it into her carrying case.  _ Didn’t you see his face when you pushed him away? He likes you too.  _ She zipped up the carrying case, but not before the truffle fork sang tauntingly up at her,  _ You missed your chance. _

“Shut up,” Byleth grumbled. She didn’t know which was worse: that she was talking to her pastry tools, or that they seemed to be better at relationships than she was?

When she returned to the banquet hall, Felix had already shut down the pastry table and carried everything to the car. Byleth brought out the last of the catering supplies, including the support structures and scaffolding for the cupcake display.

Now where had Felix gone?

Byleth followed the trail of his smoke signals. Though, it didn’t take an expert tracker to find him standing next to her car sucking down toxic clouds. She packed the tools into the trunk before turning to Felix.

If her keen eye for baker’s percentages had an accurate read on his expression, she’d say it was about 37%  _ annoyance _ , 58%  _ curiosity _ , and a 5% margin of  _ well, you can fuck right off _ . That was as much as she could expect.

Byleth walked through the minefield of his glare. She cleared her throat.

_ Tch _ . He blew out smoke. A new expression: 15%  _ do you need a cough drop? _ ; 45%  _ let’s just get in the car and go _ ; and, 30% pure  _ angry-hot _ .

Byleth gulped. “I pushed you away back there. I was surprised. You’re probably still mad at me…”

90%  _ shields up _ , 10%  _ evaluating _ .

“…and I get that, I really do. But I think we would be good at kissing, and I want to touch your butt a little bit. Or you can touch mine… Anyway, I want to kiss you now.”

60%  _ shock _ ; 30%  _ awe _ , 10%  _ butterflies in the stomach _ .

Felix dropped his cigarette into the ice and ground it beneath a heel.

“…If you even want to be kissed, that is. I’m sorry you may not even want—“

He stepped forward: 60%  _ all buttered up _ , 40%  _ target locked _ . He cupped her chin in his hand (100%  _ devastating _ ) and muffled the rest of her monologue into his mouth.

Teeth-clicking and messy, Byleth couldn’t tell if Felix wanted to bite her or simply eat the creme-de-menthe from her lips. She stepped closer against him, and he grew more gentle. Her lips throbbed, sweet and tingling from the peppermint chill and the blood rushing to her face.

Their kissing smeared the burn, making it contagious across the body. Fire in her veins, blood pumping in her ears.

Simmering need shot through her. Her tongue pushed against his, perfect friction enveloped in fresh smoke and the taste of champagne. She put her hands on his hips and pulled him roughly against her.

There was only one thing left.

She needed his touch.

His eyes squinted shut and his hands wrapped around her back. She could feel every inch of his body against hers. Her spine tingled where his hands held her.

She gasped, and her mouth was still open when he pulled back.

“So?” He asked, fierce eyes russet in the dark cold night, still holding her possessively against himself. “You have more to say?”

“Just, Merry Christmas?”

Soft smile, brightening eyes: “Can we get out of here?”

She bit her lip, bounced against his body in a way that jolted them both. “I know a spot.

— — —

** Truff: ** cranberry mint gin trailblazer  
** Filling:  ** mint steeped, cranberry infused, and dosed with a healthy shot of gin  
** Shell: ** white chocolate  
** Ideal palate: ** baby, it’s cold outside

Highbeams blazing, Byleth drove around tight switchbacks into the mountains. The night was so quiet, they could imagine it was just the two of them, and the roadside snowbanks, and the star-studded cosmos stretching wide through the windshield. Felix leaned his head against the rest, listened to eight-year-old tunes, felt his stomach flutter.

They parked at an empty overlook: a hiking trailhead, a picnic table, and a big-sky view that could startle even the most spitfire amber eyes. She cut the lights, pulled the hand-brake. Armored in scarves and coats, they stepped into the cold and puffed the rarefied air full of white clouds.

Byleth hopped onto the hood of the car, and Felix followed. Feigned nonchalance. Sitting close without touching. With solstice stars above and the city’s lights below, Felix could smell the forest pines behind them. A slight funk on the northerly breeze told him that more snow was coming.

She scooted to sit hip to hip. Halos gathered around the lights. Green, red, and bright white flickered as bokeh in the distance, a garnish on the usual yellow-toned street lamps. He could hear the Northern winds gusting a white Christmas through the tree branches. He felt the car sway.

Felix lost track of time. Byleth’s fingers threaded between his.

Everything focused on the way Byeth’s thumb circled the blue veins at the top of his skin. Electric shivers that made his breath short.

“I’m always thinking about work.” His voice low and strangely warm around the words. “But this place feels so peaceful.” They lay back against the windshield and watched the stars swirl an intricate pole dance.

He could touch her, she thought. He could be touching her right now.

Their breath rose in clouds, a brief steam into the cold night. They were aware of being cold, but the sensation of it seemed so far away.

Bodies rested heavily on the hood of the car. Thigh against thigh, hand in hand, their legs hung off the front bumper. His toes skimmed the ground.

“Are you cold?” She asked. She didn’t wait for an answer before her hand started stroking up his thigh. He followed her lead. Fingers grasping up the sides of her tights to find her skirt hem. She had a smile that he’d never seen before as she turned onto her hip.

An eternity of a pivot before she zoomed toward him in slow motion. Closer, closer until she was there kissing him. Her tongue traced his night-dry lips and felt its way through the shadows of his palate.

His hands were on her back. Her thick coat blocked access to her skin so they rose to twine in her hair. Soft, waved like garden vines. He could hear their heartbeats pumping low and deep. He could hear everything: her breath, ragged from the thought of him; the car hood creaking and bowing as she sat up to straddle him.

He raised his neck to kiss her. Eager hands unbuttoned her coat, felt her up under her shirt before he could think to stop them. He cupped her breasts. She moaned and leaned into him. Hard nipples under his fingertips. He played with them over the lace of her bra.

Were they moving quickly? Or, was his brain simply moving too slowly?

She was undoing his belt and tugging at his pants. He wanted to let it happen. Sink into the car and have Byleth touch him the way he’d always dreamed.

They hadn’t set boundaries or talked about it. They were liable to take it too far. Then, they’d be praying that the drunk-ass beautiful night would save them from awkwardness.

She pulled at his zipper, and he grabbed her hand.

“I am so into you,” he said, voice low and scratchy. The words shot a grin through her.

These were things that men say. It was nice that they said them, and it was okay to let them feel good. But to dignify them as anything more than ‘the things that men say when they’re about to get off’ was a rookie error. Byleth might’ve been many things—mercenary home baker, cat enthusiast, impatient lover—but she was no rookie.

She bent her head down to kiss him again. The woolen coat on her back formed a shield against the cold. The blissed-out world morphed prettily around them: an impressionist painting with the starry night above and Byleth’s breasts staring him in the face. Her eyelashes skimmed his neck. Every brush of their lips sent his heart wilding.

Her hand crept to rub his bulge, fingers on the inseams of his pants.

He had one more chance to explain himself: “I’ve watched your show for so long. I learned more from you than I did in culinary school.”

“That’s so flattering.” Her mouth was lazy, tumbling out words. “Don’t look so panicked.” She watched his face: heavy from desire, tense from nerves. “Just thought we’d fool around. We don’t have to...”

His forehead relaxed, and he nodded, “Don’t stop.” Fooling around was fun and simple. Just the thought that she would want to touch him made his abs tighten, every inch of skin tingling and aroused.

He unzipped his pants and left it at that.

Byleth began toying with his underwear. The promise of her hand halfway in his pants was everything. His cock stretched out, growing harder with each finger that swiped below the elastic. She pushed his pants down his hips. 

Felix arched back. Hair drifted loose from his ponytail onto the windshield. Byleth started to touch his dick, first through the boxers, then reaching under. “Fuck!” he called out. Her fingers were really cold. “So cold!” They were like bloodless ice.

“Sorry!” She released him, and the elastic snapped his hips and made his eyes water. He wrapped his hands around hers to try to bring some warmth into those digits. “Sorry, sorry.” She slid off the car, reappeared with a down camping blanket from the trunk and a tube of coconut oil from their catering kit. She threw the blanket around both of them. The coconut oil was solid until she rubbed it between her hands. They would all melt together: the lube, the ice in her veins, the frosty chocolatier between her legs.

This time, when she wrapped her hand around him, he immediately felt that desperate need for more. She liked the weight of him in her hand. Solid, firm. Skirt hiked up, she grinded her hips against his and felt him leap against her palm. Pumping slowly up and down his length, she rocked him into a new high.

Everything was vibration. The micro friction made by the lines of her palm against the smooth skin of his pretty flushed dick. The humming hood of the car. He had a hand on her thigh, digging to find her flesh beneath the eyelet holes of the lace, but his fingers scrabbled frustrated. The night was too cold for one pair of tights; another lay beneath.

Felix could hear his own ragged breathing, as her hand pumped him full of anticipation and need and endorphins. Thoughts intruded. He was living it, a fantasy come to life, a mental porno nightly staged with this person—the only channel on the internet he’s subscribed to; the one who made him ugly laugh at work; who made him feel stupid stolid wrath whenever someone else brought her flowers; the one whose face he was constantly tracking to catch a glimpse of her smile.

Her lips moved against his. His hand was grasping the skin of her back, roughly tracing the curve of her spine before reaching down to tuck up under the hem of her skirt. This was one of those good things about the world. Being held. Fucking into her hand. Dreaming for more.

She asked how he likes to be touched. He moved her fingers around his length, showed her how to flick gently at him with one finger just under the head. It’s another thing she knew about him, an intimate secret to get him seeing stars and sipping gasps from the cold air.

It’s so much, what she was doing to him. She loved it. Feeling him throb against her palm. She grinned recklessly, bit her lip. So turned-on to see him blissed-out against the car glass, pupils dilated from the endorphins, modest under the blanket. She pressed his hand against her thigh. Hot, hungry, needy for him to start touching her.

She wasn’t stopping, so he couldn’t stop. Blood pumped loudly in his ears as he thrust his hips into her hand, trusting her with the rhythm, until his world buzzed and shocked.

He was having a meltdown, stomach muscles clenched tight, legs shot out.

His mind blanked and recomposed itself, unfocused and messy like a hand was smearing the oil paints of the sky. Byleth, violent heathen that she was, laughed.

She was laughing and there was cum, vaguely iridescent in the half-light, webbing between her fingers. It was on his pants, some on the hem of his shirt, and she’s laughing, high and unable to stop.

“I have a catering rag in the back we can use. Hold on.”

“Our laundry service won’t be pleased,” Felix grimaced.

Byleth hopped off and took her body heat with her. “Can’t be any worse than cake batter or…  _ marshmallow _ , I bet that’s awful to wash out.”

He stepped off the hood, blanket wrapping over his coat and around his shoulders. He found Byleth digging in the catering tools in the back seat, felt the warmth from the car still running this whole time.

“Are you comparing my cum to marshmallow?” His hand concealed a helpless smile. It was ruin to look at. His features softened and lit up. Dark hair fell around his face and frostiness melted from his eyes.

Byleth never knew what she wanted. Yet, for the moment, she could only think of what bliss it would be to ruin herself on him.

She cleaned her hands with the rag and tossed it over. He wasn’t diligent about the wipe down. He wasn’t tidy about buttoning himself back up, boxers puffing out over the top of his pants. He had  _ plans _ . He kissed Byleth in the doorway of the car, pushed her backward through it. She allowed it. Her hands scrambled for him below layers of wool as he pressed her into the backseat.

He spread wide her open coat. His fingers barely began grasping her skin before her breath morphed needy, impatient. He pulled up her skirt, tugged at the elastic on both pairs of tights to pull everything down at once. “Just fooling around,” he assured her.

“Yes,” she breathed, grateful for the car heat with each inch of flesh he revealed. Lips trilled up her inner thighs, teased her with nips and kisses. She throbbed, ready to get off with or without him, but certainly because of him.

It wasn’t long before he had her groaning. Fingers in her hollows, biting kisses on her skin. Her body let him curl and expand inside of her. Back sinuously arched, her shoulders bumped against the leather seats, caught wriggling on a hooked finger that found the right spot against her inner wall. She rubbed circles across her breasts. When Felix reached up with his spare hand to replace hers, she purred into the air and bumped her hips into him.

“Kiss me,” she demanded, bringing her head up so he could find her lips. Felix took liberty with the command; he brought his lips down on her core, nibbling without teeth until she was making soft squawking sounds. Pure fucking joy to the world, the best Christmas carol he’d ever heard.

“Softer,” she gasped. His tongue snuck out to open rifts inside of her. Her mind echoed every motion, as she throbbed in time to it. Then, “I can’t go on much longer like this.”

It’s his turn to laugh because she was too fucking honest and weirdly dramatic. The cackling hot breath shot vibrations against her. She pushed back on him, helpless, desperate. He moved so slowly in and out of her, forcing her to catch every sensation.

Looking up through his lashes, Felix could see how her eyes squeezed shut to block out their surroundings, the tightness of the car, the vastness of the stars.

She released strangling cries from the back of her throat, before “Fuck, shit, oh my god!” Her back arched, a silhouette so tantalizing in the dim light he groaned and pushed his tongue deeper into her folds. Her hips bucked against him, “Oh my god.” 

Each shout, a sublime Christmas prayer to wring and loosen knots from every pent up nerve ending in her body, until she relaxed against the leather seat and everything slipped away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warmest wishes this holiday season and thanks for reading!


	5. in the cold, cold night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> new year's

**Confection:** peppermint bark (half-priced the day after xmas)  
**Description:** layer 1—peppy-infused dark chocolate,  
layer 2—peppy-infused white chocolate  
**Garnish:** candy-cane bits  
**Ideal palate:** peppermint has an expiration date.  
the month before Christmas, it flies off the shelf.  
a few days after Christmas, though, the whole world has collective amnesia about their candy-cane cravings and visions of sugarplums

Chocolate-work is alchemy.

It begins with chemistry:  
\- cocoa fats (oleic, palmitic, and stearic fatty acids)  
\- cocoa solids (roast the bean, grind the cocoa liquor, and extract the solids)  
\- sugars  
\- all-natural emulsifiers (most commonly soy lecithin)

Formulas and percentages are a chocolatier’s _Corpus Hermeticum_. A warmer set at a perfect 96 degrees makes their cauldron. Tempering is their alembic. And through it, they turn a gooey ugly bean into delicious melt-in-your-mouth gold.

Experience teaches us, however, that alchemists suck at relationships. 

So when Felix abstained from communicating with Byleth for three days (unless he counted the drunken photos he sent her on Christmas), it was only partly to play it cool. The rest was pure dread. He rang twice, hung up. Grumped to his kitchen, fed his cat. He dialed again.

Byleth picked up on the sixth ring. In the meantime, he strongly considered hanging up again.

“Felix?” She croaked his name. “It’s five in the morn—“

“My brother’s throwing a New Year’s party,” he hissed.

“My condolences.” It was two hours before they were due at work, and Byleth was audibly shifting around in bed. “New Year’s parties always blow.”

“All parties always blow.”

“People making pledges and resolutions they’ll never keep.”

“Yeah, they do this every year, and it’s the worst.”

“So…” she yawned, “you want me to call with a false emergency so you can leave?”

“That’s tempting, but I already got enough shit after running off with you on Christmas Eve.”

He heard her breathing deepen.

In his mind’s eye, he could see her grinning up at him in the backseat. A rare blush had colored her face while she struggled to express some sort of buoyant magical feeling that she was much too cynical to put into words. Until she shut up. Sat up. And, framed against the steam-obscured car window, in the oblique lighting from the city on the darkest night of the year, she dared to tell him how nice his hands were.

He wondered if she was lying there in bed remembering it too.

His face had rested against her chest as her stomach rumbled into his. She had tipped her face upward for him to kiss her. The sky grew lighter as snow-flurries were blowing against the foggy windows, and Byleth was cursing about the very real possibility of running out of gas if they didn’t get back down the mountain.

“Worth it, I hope,” she said, tone flat across the phone.

Parked in front of his apartment, he could still feel the phantom sensations of her mouth trailing insatiable under his neck. Or the way she had nipped at his lips, hands hardly daring to touch more than the ends of his hair. A last kiss as he was leaving the car, like it was always meant to be a date.

“I don’t have a choice about this party,” he said.

“Bummer.”

He puffed out his breath. Gritted his teeth. Why wasn’t she getting it yet?

“I want _you_ to come with me.”

She shifted in the bed, wide awake now. “A party at your brother’s house?” She couldn’t help remembering the way his whole family had stared at her on Christmas Eve. “I’m a shit conversationalist, and my 600k Youtube subscribers won’t do anything for your social capital.”

“Tch, I don’t care that you’re Internet famous.” He pinched the corners of his eyes. Was she being deliberately difficult? “I’ll shield you from conversations, just come.”

“What’s in it for me?” Coy tone. He could hear her moving around. Was she starting the shower?

His face burned as he imagined her unceremoniously stripping off her clothes and stepping into the flow of water. He tried to keep his tone natural. “The food will be good.” He listened for her laugh. “And I’ll kiss you at midnight.”

“Just make out with me at work today.” That was definitely the sounds of the shower running

He paused, dragged a fresh chef coat from his closet. Narrowed his eyes in the hanging mirror. “You think I’m easy like that? That I’ll just make out with you whenever you want?”

“Felix, you are the least easy person I’ve ever met.”

“I’m not kissing you again unless it’s midnight at my brother’s stupid New Year’s party.”

“We’ll see about that. See you at work.” She yawned and hung up.

All he had to do was not kiss her. How hard could that be?

— — —

**Truff:** pecan caramel  
**Filling:** exactly what it says on the tin  
**Shell:** dark chocolate infused with a dram of  
‘oops, I said not to make this weird but then we sprinted to third base’  
**Ideal palate:** sorry, not sorry

Byleth’s surname Eisner might have once designated an ironworker, but these days she specialized in a different kind of tempering than metallurgy. The candied-apple doesn’t fall far from the chocolate-tree, however, since tempering chocolate is similar to tempering a metal alloy. Both involve a process of heating and cooling to reduce brittleness and increase durability.

It begins with melting.

Melting the chocolate eliminates the previous crystalline structure so that cooling can then rebuild it. Tempering manipulates the fatty acids in the cocoa butter. In case you were wondering, Cocoa butter is a six-phase polymorphic crystal, and tempering happens in phase five. The rest of the phases make for crappy chocolate.

This is all an arcane way of saying that chocolate goes through a process.

Like metallurgy, like manuscript-editing or Universal entropy, like alchemy (probably) and love (bear with me here), tempering is a combination of cooling and agitation.

Byleth showed up to work that morning in her street clothes, a flannel shirt and a pair of black jeans, like she was about to go fishing, not craft dainty bonbons. Felix tried to be bothered by what a dude she looked like; no luck. Besides, it was inventory day. Dull as hell without even the distraction of a fast-paced production cycle.

The days between Christmas and New Year’s were like treading the only safe path between the Scylla of the holidays and the Charybdis of Valentine’s. Ominous calm would not last for long. Time went into repackaging, inventory. Once they took stock, though, production would ramp up harder and more grueling than ever for the dark hell that was the countdown to Valentine’s Day.

Felix went to hand Byleth the inventory clipboard. He shifted his fingers carefully away from hers, lest they almost touch. Because touching fingers is dangerous. It gives people _ideas_.

She grabbed the clipboard brusquely. Printed spreadsheet, columns of numbers. The last thing to do was a manual inventory. Byleth and Felix began it side-by-side in the front kitchen.

Byleth counted pre-packaged boxes of truffles. There were just a handful of classic boxes left, they’d been nearly cleaned out. She marked something down on her clipboard, and her big eyes flicked over to Felix who was brushing back his hair and looking away from her.

“Thanks,” she said, “for that Christmas selfie you sent, you looked really…” She swallowed the spit thickening at the back of her throat. Felix counted the same fifteen truffles six times. “Were you wearing a shirt?” The question had been nagging at her.

Felix almost choked.

There was no shirt to be seen in the photo, just Felix holding a fluffy cat against his chest in nothing but a tiny Santa hat.

Awkwardness hung in the air like Hilda’s perfume, everywhere and overpowering. The store was quiet, just Ashe in the front practicing his latte art, Mercedes lost in her own world in the very back, and the two chocolatiers standing next to each other at a prep table. Felix’s eyes flicked over to look at Byleth. She was biting her lip like when she—

“Cute cat,” she said finally.

God, he wished she would stop biting her lip like that.

“Yeah,” he said. “And thanks for responding with that video of your dad snoring on the couch.” He was looking straight into Byleth’s mischievous grin. “It was weird, honestly.”

“Good weird?”

“Weird.”

“I figured you must be sick of my face from YouTube...”

From the corners of his eyes, he watched as she embarked on a fishing mission.

“Unless you wanted me to send you something spicier…”

He shrugged. No bite, cast again.

Then, it dawned on her: “Holy Sothis, you were topless! Was I supposed to send you a topless pic, too? Not my dad snoring on the couch…”

Felix started cackling. Reel it in, Byleth, reel it in.

Just then, they heard Annette’s voice clear as a fire alarm and trotting into the kitchen: “Hey guys! Merry Christmas! Can you believe this year has passed so quickly? And V-Day is just around the corner! I stayed up all night manic-cleaning the dishes from holiday leftovers.” She stopped and looked from Felix to Byleth as panic colored both their faces. “What’s going on?”

“Inventory!” Byleth blurted out. Felix rushed into the back kitchen to count caramels.

While Felix repetitively counted out truffle numbers and scribbled them onto the clipboard, the rest of the staff arrived in varying degrees of excitement and agitation.

Lysethia stormed through with a: “What are we standing around for? We have no time to lose!” before whirling into the back kitchen and promptly becoming covered in flour.

Mercedes came forward for her 8 am lunch with a serene smile: “Oh, hi Felix, Byleth has been blushing bright red and muttering things about fluffy white cats. Any chance you showed her a photo of Kyphon?”

Felix gulped. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Oooh,” Mercedes cooed, pulling on a tweed coat. “I baked gift treats for all the pets. I’ll bring them to the New Year’s party.”

“Thank you,” Felix said, spotting Byleth’s green hair poking around the corner.

“The good ole Fraldarius New Year’s party. I can’t wait!” Sylvain trotted back with a scarf still around his neck and hair swept all to one side from walking in the wind.

“Do you have a date for it, Sylvain?”

“Affirmative, asked them last night.” Sylvain grabbed a tray for restocking cookies. It was the only opening task Ashe ever left him. “Why aren’t you asking Fe, though?”

“Because Felix never has a date,” Annette said, bored. She started measuring vats of sugar and blooming sheets of gelatin to make marshmallows.

“Yeah,” Sylvain said, rounding the corner into the back kitchen. He found himself looking right into Byleth’s eyes as she eavesdropped against the partition. “Felix _never_ has a date.”

He grinned and winked. Byleth scowled. She opened her mouth, and by the time she closed it, Sylvain was already in the walk-in cooler grabbing cookie dough. Byleth rushed back to her station to dull her mind with inventory.

“Well, I’m just going with Mercie,” Annette carried on blithely, “so you can hang with us. We’re coming by early to help Ingrid get all dressed up. I guess she’s a little nervous about hosting? Time was short, but I have some extra fudge that I made during Christmas that I can bring, and I’m so looking forward to seeing Ingrid again and…”

Late afternoon saw most of the cooks depart, effectively closing out the chatter that had reigned throughout the kitchen all day. This left Felix and Byleth as the last line of defense still working. With the inventory complete, Felix marched up to Byleth, a fleet-footed messenger approaching the commander of a battle-line.

“I crunched the numbers.” Again, their fingers did an intricate avoidance disco when he handed her a sheet of paper covered in calculations. “Here’s what we need for Valentine’s sales.”

“Mother Sothis,” Byleth said, taking in the extent of the production numbers they needed. “Say goodbye to your social life.”

“This is my social life.”

“Edelgard’s already approved overtime. Can you work until close today?” The request was unsurprising, as was Felix’s stern nod. “I’ll be here with you.” He looked up at her and then away.

The kitchen remained a ghost town all evening, while the front of house workers infrequently brought back cakes for Byleth to write on and espresso shots for Felix. He claimed the front kitchen, she the back. They spread their work across all the prep tables, taking space simply to justify the need to occupy both kitchens. Felix rolled tables worth of spiky truffles, dipping them, then marking them up with his truffle fork. Byleth piped lavender ganache into beautifully painted purple shells.

Every fifteen minutes, while waiting for her temper test to set up before proceeding with the next step, she flattened herself against the blind corner and watched Felix work. Every thirty minutes he walked past her through the back kitchen to grab more trays of naked truffles to roll.

The last time he did, he came to stand next to Byleth, “I see you watching me.”

She turned to lean back against the prep table. Her head was bent over the printed formula for lavender ganache as she made notes to tweak the recipe. The lean was so natural like it was her own kitchen and this was simply another video…

By the time she looked up, Felix had silently made his way around her table.

His expression: careful evaluation with a side of smolder.

Her expression: _à la carte_ cravings with a water glass drained to the ice.

He took a step toward her, another step. He was so close she could feel the space between his breaths. The clipboard languished, forgotten in a hand that had fallen to her side.

She looked up, her mouth opening slightly in anticipation of the kiss. Felix’s face was angling down to her.

Her whole body buzzed. This time, she thought, she would grab his hair and really feel its texture against her fingertips. Lips parted, she waited. Felix’s face came to hover centimeters from hers.

Heartbeat rolling, anticipation killer.

Why wasn’t he closing the distance? Why hadn’t he claimed her mouth already?

His lips parted slightly. His eyes were wide open watching her.

She rose on her toes, lurched forward at him.

But, quick and smug he pulled away so that she was left with her mouth open trying to kiss air.

“To be continued,” he said, “December 31st at midnight.” And he was already walking away with a brutally hot smirk on his face.

“Fine.” She hurled at his back, struck by a craving stronger than any sweet tooth. “Fine. I’ll go to your stupid New Year’s party with you.”

“Good,” he said triumphantly over his shoulder. “Wear something formal.”

— — —

**Confection:** peanut brittle  
**Description:** buttery hard-crack caramel lacing over salty roasted peanuts  
**Garnish:** the more broken up it is, the lower priority the giftee  
**Ideal palate:** a polite gift when visiting someone’s home during the holidays

“Is this what you would call ‘something formal’?”

Byleth dashed past her father’s office, throwing the video chat with Claude on her phone for a dizzy tango. Her camera stuttered from her annoyed made-up face and the perfect cut-crease eyeshadow she had worked on for twenty minutes in the mirror to her silver pleated skirt and black blouse.

Claude sounded a nonchalant, “Can you hold still?” through the phone speakers and straightened his collar in his own bathroom mirror.

“The makeup looks right.” He squinted as if that would give him a better vantage. “Can you show me where the blouse tucks into the skirt?”

He slicked back a cowlick as Byleth began shaking the camera around like she was filming indie horror on a hi-8 camcorder and not getting dressed for a New Year’s party. Finally, she set him down and showed him her waistline.

Claude, motion sick from the shaky-cam, could only say: “It looks good, By. Very you.”

“Just look at you!” Jeralt began enthusiastically. He had picked up the line from a supportive dad in some movie and tried it out in his office three times before employing it. “All dressed up and going to a party. I haven’t seen this since you were… nineteen? I’m shocked that kid coerced you into a New Year’s party.” And now he was back to the same old Jeralt. “So when do I meet him?”

“Any minute now.” Byleth tugged her tights and, forgetting Claude still had access to her phone cam, switched its orientation to selfie to check her teeth for lipstick. A groan through the speakers before, “Teach, I’m still here, you know.”

“Sorry Claude.” Byleth switched the camera back and left him looking at the ceiling. “Are you going to be okay on your own tonight?” she asked her dad for the tenth time.

“Please, kid, don’t worry about me. Besides, fancy parties are—”

But Byleth never heard exactly what her dad was about to call fancy parties because the doorbell rang.

Jeralt, broad-chested and stern-faced, opened the door on a scowling Felix. “Come in,” Jeralt grunted before immediately moving to stand firmly below the wall covered with boxing trophies. He crossed his arms over his chest. A pair of busted up boxing gloves dangled ominously beside his right shoulder.

“Gotta go,” Byleth hissed into her phone, “dad’s flexing his guns by the boxing trophies.”

“That old gambit... Respect,” Claude laughed as she hung up their call.

Felix had stepped three feet into the door and was finding his way barred by Jeralt who was visibly flexing his biceps in their crossed position, all the while pretending at the ‘chill, cool’ dad.

“So you’re another chocolate maker, huh?” Jeralt asked.

“Just for work.” Felix was finding his jaw to be more akin to a spring-loaded mechanical hinge than something formed of bone and flesh. “I don’t know much about sports…”

_…besides baseball metaphors for the bases I’ve run with your daughter…_

Felix clamped his jaw so quickly there might have been a whirring of cogs and an audible click as the locking mechanism snapped into place. He blushed, peered up over Jeralt’s head at the shelf of trophies.

Silence reigned.

“So, boxing awards…” Felix forced himself to say.

“Oh, you noticed those?” Jeralt replied without a modicum of surprise. “Many of those are Byleth’s too. She can handle herself. I taught the Kid to carry a knife everywhere she goes, so if anything happens—”

Felix gulped. “I can take care of myself too,” he said. Then had to step on his own foot about it. “I mean, I can take care of her.”

“I don’t need _anyone_ to take care of me,” Byleth rounded into the scene and dragged her dad away from the wall of trophies. Immediately his intimidation factor dipped about fifteen percent, and Felix could breathe easy again. “I’m not a teenager, and this isn’t prom! Stop being so nostalgic.” She gave Jeralt a frustratedly affectionate punch on the shoulder and pushed Felix out the front door.

Felix’s voice came surprisingly close to her ear. “Are you going to knife me now? Because I have to warn you, I won’t go down easily.”

She looked up at him, face softening as she took him in for the first time. He was sharp and sure of himself, despite some of her father’s best intimidation techniques. Teal jacket, black turtleneck sweater. She considered sucking a hickey into the space just below the turtleneck to give Felix a hidden warmth to remember her by.

“Not when you look so pretty in your teal jacket,” she said as he unlocked the car.

— — —

**Truff:** champagne  
**Filling:** dark ganache infused with a brut bubbly over a layer of chocolate-covered pop rocks  
**Shell:** 60% dark  
**Ideal palate:** we’ll take a cup of kindness yet  
for auld lang syne

Byleth peered out the window as Felix drove them to his family home. They passed ostentatious houses with terraced lawns lined up on alphabetical streets named for trees.

Each house in the neighborhood was constructed from that old money capital, blasphemous if not for being the very thing that built the church. Wood-floored atriums, neoclassical interiors, and baby-grand pianos visible through arched windows.

Families that lived there had enough in assets that their blue-collared restauranteering—with the chest-sweat peeking through the chef coat and the less than glamorous grease traps—was a passion project. A family like that usually sent their kids to law school or planted them as lobbyists with the express intent to increase their wealth. Chef work was for the thrill; Byleth could respect that.

Felix led her quietly into Fraldarius house. She could already smell the aromas of a finger-food feast. Glenn’s herbs-de-Provence permeated until she could nearly taste the lavender in the air, while the smell of cooking mushrooms kept them grounded to the earth.

From the other room, voices clambered over each other to share anecdotes. Some of them were familiar from the chocolate shop, but most were a mystery. Loog the corgi’s nails clicked across the floor, heralding more footsteps that were approaching the entrance from the party in the other room.

“They’re coming,” Felix said. His tone was haunted, as if they were two soldiers defending camp from an ambush. He wasn’t wrong. In less than a minute, the party welcome-wagon followed Loog through the door to sweep them up and carry them along.

When the group of merry-makers entered the hall, Byleth was grateful to see more familiar faces than unfamiliar ones. Introductions were swift, and by the end of them, Byleth had a full glass of champagne pushed into her hand.

She was particularly grateful to find the smug smile of Sylvain’s date, her very own Claude. That is until she realized that Sylvain’s entire rum-soaked brain was hanging from the curve of Claude’s dimple. And Claude already had his hand inside Sylvain’s pocket. Clearly, the two of them would be no help.

“Oh, Byleth’s here,” Glenn rushed to the fore and shoved a small plate of some sort of meat wrapped in puff pastry into Byleth’s hand. Shooting a sharp look at Felix, Glenn led her into a decorated living room. 

Streamers trailed from a buffet table. The fireplace was decked with pictures of friends and family. Byleth nodded along politely to an onslaught of anecdotes from the small crowd of new acquaintances while she surveyed the photographs.

She stopped short over one picture in particular. It showed Felix, looking the same as he ever did, with hair in a bun and his expression long-suffering. However, on his head was a tiny Santa hat, and he was wearing a red Santa suit trimmed in white fur with gold star buttons.

Glenn laughed as Byleth’s eyes grew large. “Bet he’s never told you about how he used to moonlight as Santa over the holidays? Grumpiest gift-giving mofo you ever saw.”

“So,” Byleth whispered, “that’s where the hat came from…” her face was beginning to burn soft pink when Felix rushed past her and turned the photo backward.

Byleth dealt with waves of Fraldarius friends and family coming to talk to her. They were uncomfortably keen, as if by agreeing to merely accompany the grumpy Fraldarius son, she had taken an engagement ring and was contracted to birth the next in a line of legendary Fraldariuses.

Despite his claims of ‘shielding’ her, Felix was mostly unhelpful at the party. He would grumble, “Why am I even here?” before leading a small portion of Byleth’s bombardment off to the other side of the room while leaving her alone to deal with the rest of the wolves.

“So are you two dating now?” Byleth turned to find Dorothea’s eyes, fern-green and devious peering at her.

“No!” Byleth said too loudly.

She couldn’t explain exactly why she felt the need to deny it.

It was some combination of everyone’s assumptions,  
& the heat from the fireplace,  
& the people who were acting like they knew her already,  
& the fact that Felix was just as bad at all this party shit as she was,  
& why wouldn’t everyone let them be wallflowers?

“I’m just here as his friend.”

Immediately the room chilled and quieted around her.

“I see,” Dorothea said.

Glenn shot Felix a sharp look.

Felix glared at the fire until Dorothea grabbed his arm, “So you wouldn’t mind if I stole him away for a moment?”

“That’s up to him,” Byleth was about to say, but she hadn’t finished squeezing the words from her throat when Dorothea was already dragging Felix off.

Before Byleth could find a way to cannonball herself through a window and run down the street in her heeled boots, past all the fancy-ass houses with their hob-nobbing New Year’s galas, she found herself flanked by Claude and Sylvain.

Sylvain handed her a half-empty bottle of champagne to drink from, like some sort of party-foul dunce cap, while Claude took on the task of admonishing her.

“Not cool, By. It’s not like you have to marry the guy, but you don’t give away your date like that.”

“He wouldn’t want me to be possessive.”

“Are you sure about that?” Three pairs of eyes focused on Felix who was talking to Dorothea while heatedly glaring over her shoulder.

“What am I supposed to do? Cut in?”

“It’s crude. But I’d say it’s your best strategy.”

“Finish that bottle first,” Sylvain slurred.

Byleth took the bottle of champagne and stepped back out into the atrium, grateful to find it empty even if that meant binge-drinking alone at a party.

She slowed her breathing and looked around. Devoid of party decorations, the atrium was a microcosm of the rest of the house, giving Byleth that claustrophobic vibe of standing in a private museum. On the wall beside the coat tree and shoe rack was a strange triptych of frames. Byleth walked up to it for a closer look. 

Medieval line-art portrayed a maiden stepping down stone stairs holding a sword. Nude, except for some very conveniently-placed hair, she was offering the sword to a blond knight wearing a crown. A darker knight carrying a large shield stiffly watched the chamber entrance. Passages of poetry in uncial script narrated either side of the image.

“Loog and the Maiden of the Wind?” Byleth read aloud.

In the next room, the corgi Loog had parked himself under a buffet table to stare up at it longingly, like Tantalus reaching for a peach just out of his grasp. Upon hearing his name, however, his huge ears perked, and his stubby legs turbo-ed him into the atrium with Glenn not far behind.

“It’s a family legend.” Glenn stood beside Byleth to look at the picture. “I’m sorry that we can be a bit… much. We’re not really the snobbish assholes that we seem.”

Loog jumped at Byleth with his paws to her knee. Without hesitation, she crouched to rub behind his ears.

“Guess you’re Loog’s new favorite. He must like you because you smell like Felix. I mean,” Glenn backtracked quickly, “not _like Felix_ , but the same way he does. Chocolate-workers, you know.”

“Why doesn’t Felix live here with you all?”

“We gave him hell when he moved out a few years ago, but he insisted that he needs his space.” Glenn pinched the corners of his eyes, in exactly the same way Felix did. “Hard to blame him. I mean, we already ran you out of this party, and you’ve hardly been here a few hours.”

Byleth couldn’t help thinking that this mansion had loads of space. But then again, Felix wasn’t talking about physical space, was he?

She remembered driving him back to his own apartment in the wee-est hours of Christmas morning. Parked before a stack of tiny flats with odd floorplans to optimize space, Felix’s face had been carefully straight as he clutched the door handle and asked her if she wanted to come up. An efficient nod when she said she had better not. Inky hair long around his shoulders, he had leaned in from the car doorway, and his thin lips swiped swiftly across her cheek, before he turned away with that damnable pride bolstering every cell of his being.

Glenn watched her shrewdly for another moment before beginning to walk back into the other room, Loog bounding hot on his heels. “It’s almost midnight,” he said as if an afterthought.

Byleth crept back to the party like a thief prowling through a mansion at night, only to find that Felix was already watching her over Dorothea’s shoulder. She straightened up, steeled herself, walked over to them. Champagne bubbles were in her head now. They made her steps click louder while auras gathered around the lights.

“May I cut in?” she asked Dorothea, who smiled a quick, _of course, Chef_ , as if this was simply another day of work and Byleth had asked for a latte.

Felix glared at her, face flushed from the champagne. Bolstered by her own drunken bubbles, Byleth didn’t back down. After all, these hostile glares were becoming familiar territory.

She steeled herself. She had come this far; it was time to finish the job.

“We had a deal,” she said, as the New Year’s count-down began around them.

“ _‘Just friends’_ don’t kiss at New Year’s.” He was evaluating her face for a reaction.

“Yeah, you’re right about that.”

The count-down had barely hit ten when she grabbed his collar. The other hand, on the back of his neck, pulled him down until she felt his bangs beginning to tickle her face. This too was familiar now, the feeling of their noses knocking, the sharp line of his lips as she smeared her mouth across his.

To the sounds of HAPPY NEW YEAR’S shouts and lip-smacking from a dozen other kisses, noisemakers and wolf-whistles and the barking dog, Felix clutched Byleth against himself. And, stolen between the commotion and cat-calls, they found a moment for Byleth to hang against Felix’s neck and whisper up at him with her champagne-fueled earnestness:

“What now?”

“We get to know each other better.”

“You’re saying ‘know each other’, but all I’m hearing is—”

His voice was hot in her ear: “I want to see you fight.”

“Fight? … you?”

He grinned at the astonishment that broke through her features. “Grab more champagne and come with me.” Byleth unsteadily drained another glass that was sitting next to a full bottle. While the rest of the party was toasting, she snagged the fresh bottle and followed with her eyes glued to Felix’s teal-clad back.

Their feet stumbled an uneven clatter, as Felix tugged her through a series of rooms he didn’t bother to explain. Eventually, they made their way into a basement. The space held odds and ends that had been cast out from the rest of the house:

Sword replicas were displayed on the walls; a small entertainment space with a large couch; a fridge stocked with drinks and oddments that didn’t fit elsewhere. Damp basement smell, old sweat, along with the vaguely sweet odor of air fresheners.

Byleth didn’t know when Felix had become barefooted or had removed his tie. He stood in the middle of a space outfitted for workouts. Mats and weights and equipment.

“Let’s fight.”

Byleth kicked off her heels. Once her feet were solidly on the ground, she felt much more ready for a spar. They stood, lawfully looking each other in the face to limit sneak attacks. She tested the reach of her skirt, grateful that the pleating allowed a little movement.

Without warning, she lunged at him. It wasn’t enough to even make contact.

Felix hopped backward. He shook hair from his eyes and said, “You’re underestimating me.”

“I’m not trying to hurt you.”

She’d rather break his heart than his nose? How touching. “Come on, hit me.”

Byleth came on quick. Her movements were wild, strong, undeniably tipsy. She hit him on the shoulder with a cuffed hand. Another fist thudded against his chest.

Felix raised a knee between them. It knocked hard on her legs and pushed her away. They both reeled to reclaim their balance. As she stumbled back, Byleth’s eyes squinted competitively.

Face serious, he came at her. He threw his momentum into a kick. It would have landed near her stomach, if she hadn’t dodged nearly tumbling with the movement.

She ran toward him again. A wicked smile brightened her features, as she made contact. An open palm landed hit under his jaw. However, it seemed more interested in cupping his face than knocking his lights out. Go figure.

He shook it off and reached out for her. She dodged away, and they both heard a _rrrriiiiipppp_ , as his grasping hands split a seam in her skirt.

He let go, blushing. Byleth cackled softly as she surveyed the damage. If anything, the split gave her more room for movement.

She stepped off the mat and swigged wildly from the champagne bottle before setting it down too hard on the coffee table. It rocked and almost fell before she had the reflex to right it again. Agitated champagne foam overflowed the bottle’s lips and spilled down the side.

Uncaring, Byleth came rushing back onto the mat. The ripped formal wear merely added to her chaos as she spun at Felix.

Her fist thudded on his shoulders. The impact shot blurry tracers into her own vision. She stumbled. Falling, like a spinning top that has lost momentum, she tumbled into his arms.

He tripped back, doing his best not to drop her as the garage rocked around him like waves on a ship. Looking down into her face, he felt the full heat of their eye-contact, as they found themselves ensnared in a tango dip. 

Her hand lashed out. Felix squinted, prepared to take a punch. But her grasp was soft when it brushed against his head, and her fingers dug clumsily into his hair.

“Who taught _you_ to fight?” She asked, still reeling from the eye-contact.

“It helped my brother and I let off some steam.” Felix was always honest, but the drinks were making his words come easier. “Glenn is better. He’s better at most things.”

“I doubt that.”

“What do you know about it?”

“You’re harsh on yourself. But I don’t think you have to be...” He squinted at her. The dip was almost natural now, easy.

Until: “I think you’re remarkable.”

Felix blushed bright red dropped Byleth onto the mat.

“ _Aaaahhhh!_ ” she went down hard. Limbs splayed in shock while her head spun a nauseated merry-go-round. It took two attempts, but she flailed her legs, hooked them around Felix’s calves, and brought him crashing down with her.

He fell to his knees. His head knocked against her hip. “Sorry,” he mumbled before flopping onto his back beside her. His shoulders were already aching a premonition of the bruises he would find tomorrow morning. They struggled to catch breath that tasted too sweetly of champagne.

“What happened to you that makes you fight?” He asked her, eyes trained on the ceiling.

Her buzzed brain worked hard to parse this question.

“Growing up an outsider is never easy. Being able to fight when things go wrong makes it a little easier.”

“Survival? You really are a mercenary.”

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

She was fishing again. “Don’t play dumb,” he said.

He stood and waited for the room to stop spinning before reaching his hand down to Byleth.

“You kept pulling your punches.” Oh, so that’s what it’s called when you stop hitting someone to cradle their face. Jeralt had never taught her that move-set. “We’ll wear gloves next time.”

Eager to sit, he pulled her from the mats onto the couch. The booze took them under, sliding them horizontal until Byleth was resting on his chest.

Her head fell into the crook of his neck. Her knees curled like a cat into the space beside his waist. She sank her fingers into his hair, stroking it gently at the roots.

“Feels nice,” he muttered.

Her eyes flickered open, and she rested her little smile against his jaw.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  [chapter song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXo3CYD0g5k)   
> 
> 
> It's a new year! please take care yourself and loved ones and stay safe wherever you are. Thanks for reading!


	6. how fucking romantic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> january

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The section that begins with s’mores becomes NSFW.

**Truff:** party in your mouth  
 **Filling:** milk chocolate with crunchy cookie bits and carbonated pop rocks that fizz  
 **Shell:** 46% milk  
 **Ideal palate:** please do not bite or lick coworkers during hours of operation

The chocolate shop had become a ticker-tape parade of post-it notes, recipe addendums, and—most of all—order forms. They screamed in capital letters about cake orders, truffle boxes, and bouquets of chocolate roses. The orders flared out from their clipboards, flapping in the air condition fans and drawing eyes like neon-colored petticoats under a Valentine’s Day corset with lacing that was just barely _keeping it together_.

Stress was a bogeyman. It lurked in the walk-ins. It lay in wait at each prep table to wind the staff tightly around its skeletal fingers. But the White Clouds crew weren’t amateurs. In fact, when it came to stress management, they could teach whole seminars on the subject.

 **Coping and Meditation** with Mercedes von Martritz

Mercedes barely heard the bell toll for the 6 am workers as they came into the store. She was elbow deep in almond pâté sucrée, with lemon curd double-boiling on an induction burner, and caramel mousse fluffing in the mixer.

Felix and Byleth hurried through the kitchen. Still wearing their winter coats, they stepped into the frosty walk-in cooler to stow their lunch bags while grabbing cream and butter for their ganaches. They didn’t emerge for another fifteen minutes.

It should have seemed a curiously long time, but Mercedes was forming heart-shaped tart-crust and meditating on the color red:

 _Red for Valentine’s Day,_ she hummed. _All this red is the color of love and blood. Arteries and lust and corrosion and passion. Do you ever think about red?_ Mercedes giggled. She put a parchment liner on top of another elegant heart-shaped tart pan and filled it with dry beans for baking.

Stepping from the walk-in after a long-winded saliva transplant procedure (implemented the old-fashioned way), Felix and Byleth made silent eye-contact behind Mercedes who was still humming and giggling to herself. “Back away slowly,” Byleth whispered as they tip-toed into the front kitchen.

 **Treat Yourself to Workplace Self-care** with Hilda Valentine Goneril

At 8:30 am, Hilda flung herself through the front door with her charcoal mud mask still clinging to her face. She used the dish pit to spray it off, painted her nails, and then spent another thirty minutes among the lockers putting on her makeup. And sure Edelgard could grumble about the time-theft, but where would she be without a cake decorator, huh?

 **Goofing Off: a Professional Skills Training Workshop** with the Front of House Staffers

Sylvain answered the first phone call of the morning in a low and twanging southern accent. He answered the next phone call with a fast-paced and clipped northern accent.

By the time he was taking phone calls in his Gautier highlander dialect, no one could understand what he was saying at all, but Dorothea had tears in her eyes from laughing as she wiped up sipping chocolate from one of the counters. And that was A-okay.

Meanwhile, Ashe busied himself bringing everyone’s favorite drinks to the back of house.

In a matcha latte for Annette, he had tried to make a heart in the milk foam. Unfortunately, one side of the heart was much longer than the other, and it came out looking—for better or worse—like a green penis in the white foam. “I really didn’t intend that,” he said nervously.

Next was Byleth’s customary dirty earl gray latte. In this one, he had tried to do fern art. It also resembled a penis, though not a healthy one. “This didn’t come out the way I would have liked,” he handed it off and sprinted away.

The realistically rendered penis in Edelgard’s caramel latte even gained a bit of a bush once Ashe squeezed caramel sauce over top: “I have to admit, I’m leaning into it at this point.”

There were, however, no penises for Felix; he drank his americano black.

 **Aggressive Customer Service: A Treatise** by Edelgard von Hresvelg

From the back office, Edelgard’s voice crescendoed throughout the afternoon as she answered phone call after phone call. It climaxed with her slamming the phone down, shouting, “People who talk slowly at this time of year make me want to stick a fork in my knee!” Then she stabbed a tasting spoon right into a tub of Mercedes’s caramel mousse and stuck it straight into her mouth.

 **Time Management** by Lysithea von Ordelia

Lysethia had a dozen electric timers at her station.

30 min 46 sec left on her cakes in the oven.  
1 hr 15 min until she had to turn the croissant dough.  
And so on.

She was crumb-coating caramel stout torts when Sylvain came back with another special cake order. In his one-semester-of-French accent, he asked, “Pouvay-voo dessignay … un … ‘orse … sur la gâtoe?”

To which, she exploded, “I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS!” When Sylvain pouted, she rounded on him, large offset spatula in her tiny threatening hands: “Fine! We’ll draw a horse on the cake. And it’s ‘un cheval’, idiot.”

Sylvain grinned and tacked another cake order to the board.

 **Whistle While You Work** with Annette Fantine Dominic

Annette sang:

Stirring hot nuts, and you might think that’s dirty  
But when I’m done they’ll be so sweet  
Candied nuts always make me feel flirty  
But it’s wine night with the gals, cause I’m fucking beat

 **Work Hard: a Training Seminar** with Felix Hugo Fraldarius

“If you’re stressed about work, just do the work. Then you won’t be stressed anymore.”*

*Advanced level training covers how to avoid time-wasters, including such pitfalls as eating, socializing, and kissing coworkers.

**Making Out in Inappropriate Places** with Byleth Eisner

All focus, no hesitation, Byleth zipped out five hundred fully molded honey-lavender truffles at lightning speed. Each tray she popped out seemed to wake her more and more from a trance, until some intense and all-consuming need was flaring up in her—a need that she would normally keep padlocked away in her pants.

She found Felix in his rolled sleeves rinsing trays in the dish pit. He was hidden from view behind stacks of sheet trays and two massive mixing bowls.

She prowled behind him and swiped melted chocolate across the side of his neck: “You have something right there…”

Felix didn’t have time to register her words before Byleth’s lips came up against his neck. Her tongue lapped chocolate from his skin. She sucked him clean and savored the last bit of salty-sweet as she used closed-lipped kisses to pat the spot dry.

As she began to walk away without a word, Felix grabbed her arm. “You’ve ignored me all day. Now you’re teasing and horny?”

It would have been wiser for him to turn the sprayer on her, the way one squirts water at a cat to teach it not to claw the furniture.

Instead, Felix pushed her against the sink. He started at her neck, letting his lips brush over her until her skin prickled from the attention. He smelled the perfume she applied to the pulse below her chin, beeswax and vanilla. He guided his tongue there until he found the spot—slightly bitter, savory-sweet—and he sucked.

Byleth’s eyes flashed wide before closing. She leaned her neck backward, a pendulum over plates soaking in the sanitizer water. While Felix’s teeth scraped her skin and her blood rushed to the surface under his mouth, she began remembering.

…a moment during an elementary school kickball. Byleth was normally quite the good first-baseman, but she was distracted watching a mom bring a forgotten sweater to her daughter on the bleachers. The big red ball crashed into Byleth’s face. And, as her head spun from the impact, she realized that this wasn’t the first time something like that had happened. In fact, moms were always bringing things for their daughters: special lunches to eat together, cupcakes to share with the class. It seemed that most daughters had mothers…

Felix abandoned her neck. His mouth met her lips. Hungry and hot and messy—kissing Byleth was like mainlining serotonin. His knee traveled upward between her legs.

…nose broken from the kickball with two black eyes, Byleth had asked Jeralt where her mom was. He took her on a family field trip to the graveyard behind the Church of Seiros. Byleth held a lily bouquet. _Sometimes, although someone may love us dearly, they have no choice but to leave us,_ a churchman had told Byleth while Jeralt knelt at the grave. Years later when Byleth was a teenager, Jeralt had found ways of talking about it: If she could help it, he had told her, Sitri would be right there with them, sewing patches into Byleth’s aprons and making the laminated dough Byleth was too impatient to bother with…

Byleth pulled Felix closer to her. His hips pressed hers. His mouth moved against her lips. Everything was still slightly chocolaty. She dug her fingers into hair that was uniquely Felix’s and pressed her chest against him to stay present.

…her first kiss in the empty locker room of the boxing gym. Mercenary in his desires, when he used the L-word Byleth had believed it. If she had a mom around, she might have asked what it meant when a guy says ILU with his hands down her pants? But she had never been particularly chatty or open. When he left her without warning, she asked her dad, _why do the people who love us leave if they_ don’t _have to?_ To which Jeralt had responded, _when people who_ say _they love us_ want _to leave us, they’re not worth being part of our lives at all_ …

Felix cradled the back of her neck. He let his thumb softly comb her hairline while his fingers ran circles over the top of her spine.

“Come home with me tonight?” Felix asked against her hair. “Meet me for dinner and then afterward…” He was kissing the space at the corner of her nose and she wondered if she had chocolate there.

…what Jeralt should have said—what he had always forgotten to tell her—was how that wasn’t love at all. He should have told her that, although those people didn’t deserve to be part of her life, there would be ones who would...

…Jeralt meant well. And Byleth never knew what she suffered from the things he never knew to tell her…

“Not tonight, flattered though.”

“A date then? On our day off? A real date.”

“I’ll think about it.”

He nodded into her forehead and released her.

— — —

**Confection:** s’mores  
 **Description:** a high-quality slab of chocolate languishes, melting across a vanilla-bean speckled marshmallow on a bed of graham cracker  
 **Garnish:** no frills here besides the degree to which you burn your ‘mallow  
 **Ideal palate:** when your best friend roasts you like a marshmallow on your own livestream

Byleth’s laugh filtered into Felix’s laptop as her mic and camera went live. Weeks ago, Felix had never seen Temper Demon so much as smile, and now even her laughter was becoming familiar. Claude’s face came on screen next to hers. His shrewd eyes pretended to look out on Byleth’s audience, already conscripting them for some elaborate plot.

“…This week is all about making s’mores, and I have another guest. Meet my friend Claude. He and I have gone camping together every year since we were teenagers. He makes legitimately the best s’mores I’ve ever eaten.”

Byleth showed the camera each of the components she had prepared: freshly baked graham crackers that made her whole house smell like hot brown sugar, fluffy marshmallows whipped up in the mixer and left to set overnight, chocolate bars that she had molded into the perfect size.

“So, Claude, what’s a good occasion for making s’mores?”

“You mean, besides camping? I always flex my s’mores making skills on a good Valentine’s Date.”

Byleth snapped a puzzled look his way: _You do?_

He smiled puckishly and began torching a marshmallow. “What are your V-Day plans, By?” He held the torch a little away from the ‘mallow and pretended to focus on the lightly browning edges.

“Hard labor and then on to our camping trip.” Byleth tried to play off Claude’s question like it wasn’t personal or irritating. “Are s’mores good date food, though? They’re messy.”

“Depends on whether your date is by a campfire.”

“All dates should be by a campfire.” Byleth was less patient when toasting her ‘mallow. She brought the torch flame right up to the surface, making the edges pucker with charred sugar.

“When’s the last time you went on a date, By?”

She looked at Claude right between his smug eyes: _Not on camera, idiot!_

“It’s been a long time since you’ve been on a real date, hasn’t it?”

Byleth's expression narrowed to: _I’m going to smash your face in._ Then she looked directly into the camera, and Felix registered a new expression he had never seen before, _embarrassment._

“Claude! No one wants to hear about my dating life.” She picked up a graham cracker and smacked her burnt marshmallow onto it. “The key to the recipe for my delicious home-baked graham crackers,” she hissed through gritted teeth, “is all in the brown sugar and the butter...”

Byleth turned her focus to the computer screen for comments and questions about their s’mores method. Instead, all the comments were about Byleth’s dating life.

 **@BigBrawlerBalthie:** you could go on a date with me. i’d show you a good time  
 **@Pinelli_04432:** you shouldn’t have to go on a date if you don’t want to. dating culture is toxic and unnecessary  
 **@TheRealFerdinandvonAegir:** Is there someone you would like to spend Valentine’s with? Tell us more!

Byleth looked up at the camera. Flustered lines pressed between her eyebrows. “We really should talk about the process of making marshmallows…”

“You’ve been doing boring tutorials for years. Your viewers want to know more about _you_ ,” Claude said before munching down on a perfectly composed s’more. Meanwhile, Byleth’s s’more was looking like a snowman that someone had maliciously poured hot coffee onto before leaving it in direct sunlight.

“I _don’t_ go on dates with _viewers_ ,” she said as evenly as she could. Claude raised his eyebrows. “I mean, there is this one guy, but…” She snapped the s’more in half and shoved it in her mouth so she wouldn’t have to talk anymore.

 **@ChemNerdLin:** What’s he like?  
 **@Gatekeeper:** Who is he?

“He’s another chocolatier and that’s all I’ll say about it. Claude, please oversee the construction of the s’mores.”

Byleth turned away from where the comment section was filling up with,

 **@Pinelli_04432:** oh, a rival chocolatier  
 **@TheRealFerdinandvonAegir:** I love rival romances.  
 **@ChemNerdLin:** If he works with chocolate is he a romantic?

She had never been so relieved to end a Livestream or to kick the less-than-contrite Claude out of her home. She avoided her inbox. She avoided her comments and social media.

She reclined on her bed and dialed Felix.

“That was almost painful to watch.” He said, picking up.

“You saw it?” she groaned. “I’m so mad at him. Showing people that I have friends is supposed to be good for my numbers. But that one definitely tanked.”

Felix thought of Byleth shooting flustered looks at the camera while waving around a s’more that could have been a first-grader’s arts & crafts project. Fucking adorable. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. So what are you doing with all the s’mores you made?”

“I already stress-ate half the tray.”

Felix barked out a laugh.

“How are you?”

“Tired. Just got off work when I tuned into your stream.”

“Huh…” A little sigh through the receiver shivered his spine. Her hands began to wander. “What if I told you I was lying here in bed, pulling off my shirt, and… thinking about you?”

It was all true, she realized. There was no play-acting to her seduction.

“Suddenly so awake now.”

Byleth laughed, suspended on the sharp edges of Felix’s voice. Her fingers dropped to grasp the curved planes of her rib cage.

He closed his eyes and let the images flow: warm skin lightly flushed, she would grab his wrist, raise his hand to her lips, her legs wrapping around his hips to pull him closer. He slipped a finger into the elastic of his underwear showing just above his pants.

“Thinking about running my lips down your chest, thinking about where I want you.”

“Where—” His breath came short, and she heard the rustle from him taking off his shirt, a gesture as sexy as it was futile. Dropping back onto the mattress, all his instincts focused on one need. “Where do you want me?”

“I wish…” her voice was low and rough with the price of the honesty, “I wish you were here.”

“Me too.” It was barely a whisper over the phone, but it was enough to flare her up. She skimmed her hand over her breasts. Her thumb and index finger made a bridge across her collarbones. The walls of her room faded away, nothing but the desire to be held.

On the other side of the line, Felix traced the ridges of his chest. He grasped tightly into a shoulder, the same way he knew she would. “Are you still wearing a bra?”

“Yeah,” she breathed. She let her hands drift over hard nipples pressing into the swirls of black lace. “Do you want me to take it off?”

“No.” He could imagine it all perfectly. Breasts swelling and softening her shape. The flowers of the lace so delicate he wanted to rip through them. He started fumbling with the button on his pants. 

“What’s that sound?” Her words were thick. Thoughts of what her hands were doing filled his mind. Was she feeling herself up? Touching between her legs? “Are you undoing your pants?”

Half a sigh as the button released, “Keep talking.” His voice was already wrecked, like they were really fucking. He took himself in hand.

“I can’t stop thinking about that night in the car.” She grabbed her hips pressed her thighs together, teasing her core with each throb. “You felt so good in my hand. It was so hot there with you, I couldn’t even feel how cold the night must have been.”

“Byleth…”

She listened to his breathing grow ragged. “Are you touching yourself?” She heard a soft groan. “Go slowww…” she drew the word out as her voice dipped low. She pulling her skirt up around her waist, impatiently shoved her underwear around her knees. Byleth moved her hands to the rhythm of Felix’s breathing.

He listened for her, paid attention to when her sighs waxed hot and low and needy. He could see himself on top of her, his hand between her legs, making her make those little gasps. He thought about his fingers tracing her lips and dipping into her mouth.

“Felix...” She swallowed the end of the word in the back of her throat where it turned into a sigh. Just hearing her say his name shot fire through him. He squinted his eyes closed. He dug fingernails into his shoulder. He wished he could see the images of him flitting through her mind, as she choked her core with another finger until her space was tight, and she could fool herself into thinking it was him inside. “I want you...”

Felix pushed hard into his own hand and let the reckless words take over, “I’ve thought about it so often…” He listened to her high-pitched gasp. “Pushing you up against a prep table in the kitchen. I’d grab your wrists, feel you shudder when I ran my hand down the front of that little skirt of yours…”

“Fuck! Felix…!” Once she started cursing, he knew she was close. “The next time I see you I’m getting down on my knees, and—”

His breath hitched. His hand beat more rapidly. “Byleth, I’m—”

“Wait for it!”

“By—” he groaned. His hand stalled. He listened to her shallow breaths, heard her being ravaged by her own fingers.

“Fuck! Yeah okay, fuck! Fuck!”

Felix pounded himself into an orgasm that seemed to drain the world from him, momentary blackout, hot spunk flung across his clenched stomach. Byleth imagined his hands were inside her, filling her up, not letting her stop. Felix continued to touch himself until he was too sensitive to take any more. Control lost, shoulders arched back into the mattress, Byleth felt herself throb for him and her legs twisted wishing to wrap him up.

They fell back. Yet again, Byleth found herself surrounded by boxing posters and her little work desk. Yet again, Felix looked at his white walls and unadorned bookshelf. Their breathing fell out of tandem over the phone line.

She rolled over to her side and cradled her head in her arm. “Let’s do it.”

“Do what?” Felix asked, cleaning himself up with a rag from his bathroom.

“The date thing. Let’s go on a date.”

There was a long pause across the phone while Byleth played with her bellybutton trying not to wonder what was taking so long. Finally, he said, “I’ll take you fishing.”

“I know _you’re_ a morning person, but—”

“No, at night.”

“Night fishing?”

“Yeah.”

“In the middle of January?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever done that before?”

He dropped back onto the mattress, relaxed bones rearranging themselves for sleep. “No, but you probably know about it.”

“Enough to know it’s a terrible idea. Fish don’t feed at night when it’s this cold. Do you even have a rod?”

“Thought I’d just tie a line to a stick.”

“Uh-huh. As much as I’d love to get hypothermia with you, I don’t think a date has to be that hard.”

“What’s your plan, then?” 

“We keep it simple.” She rested her cheek on the phone and thought about the warmth from Felix’s chest. “We cook dinner and watch one of those sword fighter movies you’re always talking about.”

“Sword fighter?” He grabbed a pillow and hugged it. “It’s not porn, Byleth. They’re serious films.”

“I’m very serious.”

“Fine. Come over to my place on Saturday. I’ll cook for you.”

— — —

**Truff:** pistachio  
 **Filling:** white chocolate pistachio gianduja  
 **Shell:** dark  
 **Ideal palate:** when Felix was nine, Rodrigue left on a week-long food tour,  
leaving two growing boys to feed themselves  
 _day 1:_ pizza, _day 2:_ soup from the freezer, _day 3:_ mac & cheese, _day 4:_ pizza  
 _day 5:_ Felix came down the stairs to find Glenn holding a santoku knife and gritting his teeth;  
cooking couldn’t be that difficult. their dad did it every day,  
they used blunt serrated steak knives to cut vegetables  
into the pan, they poured the expensive truffle oil that sat ornamentally on the countertop,  
the vegetables stuck to the bottom of the steel pan,  
the strips of steak cooked unevenly,  
Glenn over-salted it, Felix over-peppered it,  
it was the best meal they’d had all week

Felix was lounging on Glenn’s countertops when his brother got home. He had pulled leftover baked fish from Glenn’s refrigerator, doused it in the hospitality hot sauce Ingrid kept for him, and was picking at it when Glenn came in.

“What are you, a savage?” Glenn pretended he wasn’t surprised to see Felix sitting on his counter like a stray cat. “At least sit at the table.”

“Teach me to make this fish.” Felix poked at it. Flaky pastry crust around a fish packed with vegetables and seasonings.

“Another time,” Glenn yawned. “I’ve been on my feet cooking all day.”

“So what? I’ve been working all day too.”

Glenn shrugged, “Anyway, I’m going to go shower. I smell like a grease trap.”

“I have a date tomorrow.”

“Good for you.”

“I want to cook for her. She liked all the food at your New Year’s party.”

“Of course she did. That girl will eat anything. I’m pretty sure all you’d have to do is open some canned tuna, and she’d grab a fork and eat it straight like a cat. What are you so worried about?”

“Fine,” Felix slid off the countertop. “Thanks for nothing.”

He was halfway to the door when Glenn relented: “Okay, Fe, you win.” It was the best combination of words Felix had ever heard come from his brother’s mouth. “I’ll teach you how to make the fish. Go to the store while I shower.” Glenn quickly scrawled a list and shooed his brother out.

By the time Felix returned, Ingrid had replaced him, sitting on the countertop wolfing down food while Loog lounged at her feet. The rest of the counter was full of equipment that Glenn had set up. He grabbed the bag of groceries from Felix and started tossing full blocks of butter into a standing mixer.

“There are two components you need to prep. First, you need to make these herb-and-spice butter cubes. The other is some kind of laminated dough.” Felix watched Glenn chop herbs in easy movements, like the knife was an extension of his hand. “Quit staring,” Glenn growled, “and start making the dough already.”

— — —

**Truff:** bittersweet heart  
 **Filling:** 85% ganache  
 **Shell:** the darkest couverture chocolate and a sprinkling of sea salt across the metaphoric aorta  
 **Ideal palate:** love you, obviously  
like you really care

“It’s too easy,” Felix bluffed. “We wrap the fish up in the dough with these butter cubes and bake it in the oven.”

“Easy?” Byleth swished around his kitchen in one of her little skirts. Bare walls, bare house, barely furnished with tables and chairs hoisted from the culinary school dorms. “You laminated dough for this. That’s an hours-long process.”

… _You’re too impatient, Kid,_ Jeralt had said when a teenage Byleth fucked up making puff pastry three days in a row: first it didn’t flake, then it didn’t rise, then it was as bland as a cracker. _You get that from me. If Sitri were here, she would knock that laminated dough on its ass. She always was the patient one_ …

“ _tch_ , it’s just a rough puff,” Felix said, watching suspiciously as a blank expression crossed her face before returning to the softness she only reserved for him.

“Still, you’ve gone through a lot of trouble, haven’t you?”

Byleth ran her thumbs across the spines of cookbooks on Felix’s shelf. Most were textbooks ( _On Cooking: third edition_ , _On Baking: fifth edition_ , _Advanced Chocolate Techniques_ , _Advanced Pastry and Confections_ ).

“Usually,” she said, opening a cupboard out of nervous habit. “I just put salmon in a pan, squeeze some lemon on it, and toss it in the oven.”

Felix scowled.

“No one’s ever spent more than fifteen minutes cooking for me— _including me._ ”

Felix closed the cupboard she was peering into. “Sit down.” He patted the countertop as if inviting a cat up. “And try not to seem so strange and damaged, okay?”

Perched on the countertop, Byleth leaned sideways against the fridge, and she watched Felix: knifework meticulous, face focused. There were no distractions in this apartment. The fridge was empty real-estate, save for one magnet from a local microbrewery that held up his work schedule.

He put dinner in the oven, washed fish juice from a Damascus steel knife. Everything prepared, Felix crossed back to Byleth and pulled her against him, running his hands up her thighs on the countertop.

She wasn’t sure she deserved the golden-eyed glare he was giving her. It spoke of the untold hours he would gladly spend cooking for her if she let him. She definitely didn’t deserve how softly he held her cheek or the way he raised her hand to his lips.

She bound her legs around his waist and held him wrapped until the dinner timer dinged.

Dinner steamed. The flaky pastry held its form, carefully stitched together by Felix’s fingers. It was golden brown and pretty. Sure, Glenn’s might have been even prettier, but Byleth didn’t know that. It smelled like chili peppers and savory rich butter and that salty fish brine. She hopped against Felix, sniffing the air like she’d never had a home-cooked meal in her life.

They sat with their plates, ate efficiently. Byleth’s excitement made the absence of red meat more tolerable for Felix. She drank more water because of the chili peppers but didn’t complain.

Smelling the fish, Felix’s little white cat poked his head out of Felix’s room and stalked to the table to investigate. Byleth bent over with a small piece of salmon on her finger. The fluffy cat danced around Byleth’s hand like a circus performer before swiping away the fish and carrying it into the hall.

As she started to fill up, Byleth’s eyes flicked from the black TV screen to Felix and then back.

“Just say it,” he said, voice unexpectedly warm.

“You picked a four-hour film.”

He jerked his head, annoyed, but said all the same: “We can pause at intermission if you want.”

While Byleth rinsed plates in the sink, Felix shifted the DVD into the game console. “It’s a mercenary film,” he said when she returned. “The samurai defend the weak against bandits. I thought you might like that.” His expression was hard-edged and serrated, searching for some deep-seated affirmation.

Byleth smiled lightly: “Sounds good to me.”

It may have been a long time since her last date, but Byleth knew the motions. She pulled Felix onto the couch, letting her skirt hike up her thighs. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

Peasant struggles and bearded samurai unfolded a long drama across the tall grasses of their gray-scale landscape.

They were barely through the recruiting section of the film, when Byleth began turning her head away from the subtitles to run her lips under Felix’s jaw. She pulled his face to look at her and softly bit his lower lip, relishing his grunt of surprise, however distant it seemed.

His thighs were warm as she leaned against him. But Felix pulled back. “Byleth—By, this is an important scene.”

“You’ve said that about every scene so far,” she murmured into his shoulder and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Don’t you want to…?” She fluttered her eyelashes against his neck.

“Of course I want to, but I also want to watch this movie with you.”

“I thought fooling around was what dinner-and-a-movie is about.” She dropped his shirt and sat up.

Startled by the sudden vehemence in her voice, he paused the movie and turned his attention away from the warrior grimacing on the screen. “And I thought that dating was about getting to know each other. I know _you_ already, I’ve been watching you for years.”

It was a fact. He had lists and tallies of the things she liked: her favorite flavors, the gestures she made when she was happy, the songs that she let herself dance to in the shop. “Now I’m trying to let you know me.”

Byleth’s head felt hot. Her eyes squinted. “You think you know me? Just because you’ve watched my videos, you think that gives you the right to know me?”

“I’ve been in love with you for so long.”

Even worse than her anger, Felix watched Byleth’s face go completely blank. He watched the universe break, watched it fade into black-and-white like the exhausted face of the samurai on the screen, watched it pause like the tall grasses arrested in their movement mid-tilt.

“Come again? You’ve been ‘in love’ with me?”

But Felix wasn’t a samurai epic. He worked in a chocolate shop, amidst the catcalls of dirty jokes and the siren-wails of his own coworker puppy-love. He was the blip of a televised drama, and the sad part too, the unrequited love part.

“I mean it,” he growled.

He was the exposed part. A soft-shelled side-character who spent most of his life pretending to be as hard-boiled as they come, until he admitted his feelings to the lead female, only to find her to be a cold fish at the bottom of a lake.

Because if there was anything more cruel than the way the Universe was laughing at Felix now, it was the way it had set him up to fall in love with Byleth in the first place. Someone who had brushed off love long ago like a bad haircut and hadn’t revisited it since.

“You’ve been in love with some bullshit idea of me. You don’t get to say you love me just because you pay a few dollars a month to see me make chocolates—which is _my job,_ Felix. It’s not some romantic tryst with you on the other side of the camera—it’s _my job._ ”

Felix blinked prickles from his eyes. He wished the Universe would stop doing its slow-motion dance, stop amplifying Byleth’s voice in his ear, stop her from pulling away to perch on the couch arm. He wished that the movie would unpause, turn back on, fast-forward him away from this moment.

“Good thing you’re hot,” she said squinting at him, “because that’s pathetic.”

His anger flared and crackled. His throat ached like electric charges shooting from an ungrounded outlet. Yet, for all that fire, all he felt was cold.

“That’s all you care about? That I’m hot—it’s all physical to you? White Clouds was _my_ job, and I didn’t ask you to walk in and ruin _my life._ ”

Byleth stood. Paced two toward the door, turned back to him: “Well, I won’t be there much longer. Your life can go back to whatever it was before.”

“I wish I didn’t know you at all.”

“You don’t.” Byleth stumbled slightly, grabbed her bag, fished for her car keys.

“Get the hell out.”

She opened the door and stepped out, heels clicking dully as she ran through the icy lot to her car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  [chapter song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1qTPOiWE8)
> 
> Take care and thanks for reading!


	7. it’s called: freefall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> february, valentine’s day

**Truff:** white chocolate  
 **Filling:** “hold it, hoooold it. what is this? are you trying to trick me? where's the sports?  
is this a kissing book?”

 **Shell:** it’s the top of the 4th, and Eisner steps up to the plate, bat in hand  
Felix is pitching curveballs, but my money’s on Byleth hitting it right out the park  
 **Ideal palate:** here comes the pitch! she swings and…

 _sttrrrike one_ — what’s that? Eisner has fallen for a viewer  
 _striiiiiiike two_ — it can’t be! this kid’s obsessed with his Temper Demon fantasies

that’s got to be a rough one to hear  
i’d say so, but Eisner has always given as good as she gets  
if she strikes out now, what are her chances of getting back on base?  
well, it all depends on staying focused during valentine’s day  
the big v-day, it’s a crucial time for all the players on the field

Fraldarius winds up  
that’s a heater right there  
and it’s...

 _strike thrreeeeee_ — misplaced devotions of love send her spiraling into an existential crisis

well, that’s all there is to it, folx!  
batter, yerrrr out!

Byleth shook the made-up sports commentary from her head and peered down at her broken ganache.

She cut a solitary silhouette in the chocolate shop. Thirteen hours on concrete and her toes creaked like bones. They would turn leaden for the drive home, propelling her through the early morning to a quiet bed. Pass out and wake just in time to ring the White Clouds bell again at noon.

The ganache mocked her.

There’s a first time for everything, as they say. There’s the first time she threw a punch (bigoted Harry behind the football stadium). There were first kisses and first crushes and first fucks. There was the first pastry she ruined (mille-feuille over and over again) and the first pastry she perfected (apple hand pies, crimped with a fork).

At 1 am, a week before Valentine’s Day, Byleth broke a ganache for the first time.

Chunks of fat separated hideously from liquid craters in the cream. The bowl was a mess of incoherent brown globs, like opening a tin of cat food to find indiscernible hunks of indiscernible meat in a thick and indiscernible gravy.

She’d broken ganaches on purpose before: frozen them, then stuck them in the microwave at full heat until they were wrecked all to hell. Cocoa butter and animal fats clumped away from cocoa solids, liquids separated out. It had been practice to see how much she could destroy something before repairing it.

But she had never, even at her most impatient, poured her cream in much too hot, stirred her butter in much too soon, and accidentally fucked the whole thing over. Byleth gritted her teeth, hands working overtime, but the more violently she whisked the ganache, the worse it fragmented.

She filled her lungs, pushed the air back out. Each breath resurfaced the intuition of timing. Patience, her mother’s virtue.

Byleth filled a cup with ice water. Drop by drop, it went into the broken ganache. She forced herself to stir gently and watched basic chemistry work its miracle: shattered components came back together, forming chocolate that was thick, creamy, and uniform in color.

It was past 2 am when Byleth finished piping the repaired ganache into her truffle shells. She grabbed baking parchment, unsheathed a sharpie from her shoulder pocket, and scrawled across the paper: _ready to cap and pop out._

In a couple of hours, Felix would walk in for the early shift. They had offered feeble excuses for staggering their times, as if any of the crew failed to notice that they had stopped groping each other in the walk-ins. Byleth hesitated. The marker ghosted words in the air. _Felix,_ she imagined herself writing, _there’s a lot I should have told you. I didn’t realize how serious this was… I…_

The thing about firsts is: they never stop. The Universe isn’t about to get all Heraclitus on you and talk about how every moment you’re always wading in completely different rivers, or how our empirical odds-and-bobs change with every experience we have, because the Universe expects these life-facts to be in the back of your mind all the time.

This isn’t Zen and the Art of Chocolate-Making or the Sports Pages. It’s a kissing book. So consider this: Felix Hugo Fraldarius was the first person with whom Byleth had ever fallen in love. She just didn’t know that yet.

She settled the parchment over her molded truffles and placed the tray in the first rack Felix would check that morning. Byleth remolded herself into her street clothes—her long black coat, her heeled boots—and left the building to the eery quiet of a groggy morning just a few hours short of bursting into sunrise.

— — —

 **Truff:** tart lemon truffle  
 **Filling:** enough citric acid to pucker your lips for a week  
 **Shell:** “medicinal” is the polite way of putting it  
 **Ideal palate:** keeps the scurvy away

The head chefs at the high-end restaurants have had their menus set since the New Year’s fade-to-black. They feature their richest foods, duck and steak and vegetarian tureens. Small plate appetizers, inventive amuse-bouches and sorbet palate cleansers. Four courses is the average. Six chef choice courses with a sommelier’s wine accompaniment for the foodies. Ten courses each modeled after Michelin star winners for the deep-pocketed who knew they weren’t getting laid.

This was Valentine’s.

Crying over spilled sheet trays. Vans full of flower vases tied up in ribbons zipping through the roads. Women in tight dresses with slits up the side, men in jackets and sports coats and bowties.

And the chocolate shop?

For most, it was an afterthought. People picked up a box of chocolates on the way to their date. They didn’t plan ahead for long lines; they scrambled. The smart ones made a special order.

The entire White Clouds back office was covered with prepared gift baskets and orders for pickup. Byleth fiddled with a chocolate rose and avoided Edelgard’s searching eyes.

“We’ll renew your contract for one year,” Edelgard was saying. “Unless you would prefer full-time employment, instead? Simply tell me what you need—”

“I wanted to talk to you about this,” Byleth’s gaze was almost as low as her voice. “I don’t intend on staying.”

Edelgard jerked her head up, “I thought things were going very well. We have wedding season right around the corner.” When Byleth didn’t respond, the owner switched to flattery: “We wouldn’t have made it through the holidays without you.”

“You’re discounting the talent you already have—”

“I know the value of my workers.”

“—everyone has been working hard—especially Felix.”

Edelgard cleared her throat and flashed her purple eyes at Byleth: _speak of the devil._

The kitchen manager pivoted 180-degrees, turning right into Felix. Chests less than a foot apart, eye contact she wasn’t expecting. For a second, she let it ravage her; puffed out a sad breath.

He held another carefully arranged bouquet of chocolate roses. Their foil wrappers reflected pink light across his face. A love-note trailed down. With a series of resounding clunks, Felix brusquely set the chocolate flowers onto the office table along with the rest of the orders.

He let his eyes trace all the negative space where Byleth wasn’t and left the office without a word.

“But you’ve done all the planning,” Edelgard rushed on to make amends for the air of awkwardness.

It was no use. Byleth was distractedly watching Felix clean his table and pack his things. “I’ll leave behind my notes.” Her shift had just begun.

— — —

 **Confection:** the art of the chocolate-dipped strawberry  
 **Description:** chocolate layered around nature’s candy  
 **Garnish:** striped, sprinkled, gowned, or tuxedoed  
 **Ideal palate:** are you asking me how to feed strawberries to your lover?

It was almost involuntary when Felix opened his browser window to Byleth’s livestream. Like a workday commute. So annoying. So necessary. Movements on autopilot.

And seeing Byleth was like being stuck on a train with the devil. Except, in this case, he kind of admired the devil. And he kind of desperately wished that the devil would talk to him, but there was no way— _no way_ —he would initiate. So he was stuck while time dilated into some hell-dimension of stony silence.

He had deleted her channel bookmarks and cleared his browser data so it wouldn’t autofill. Yet there he was, at the coffee table with Kyphon chewing a corner of his laptop screen, commiserating with the exhaustion surrounding Byleth’s eyes.

He was doing his overtime early in the morning. And she was doing hers late at night. When he met Mercedes to unlock the door, he often found Byleth's timesheet recording that she had been there until just an hour before he walked in. Her chocolate would still be tempered in the warmers when he got there, her ganaches still slightly runny in their shells from how recently she piped them.

“I’d never really understood the Valentine’s Day hype,” she was saying on-screen. “This year, though, I thought I would have a special someone. Sometimes things don’t work out that way. You say the wrong thing and…” She puffed out a plosive breath and fluttered her fingers like a bomb, “everything blows up in your face.”

She looked down into the chat and then back up. “He won’t see. He’s unfollowed me on everything.” Her eyes flickered to the chatbox again: “‘Apologize with chocolate?’ If only it were so easy. I seem to have picked the one person who doesn’t like sweets.”

Felix huffed indignantly, watching the chat fill up with indignant all caps: _WHO_ _DOESN’T LIKE YOUR CHOCOLATE?_ and _WHAT AN IDIOT._

“Actually, it’s partly my fault.” A brittle little laugh. Alongside every viewer there, he savored her vulnerability, was haunted by the desire in her words.

 **@LadyValentine:** Was it l-o-v-e?

“Hilda?” Byleth startled. “Is that you?”

 **@ImURGirl:** Chef, we have to know

“Annie? Seriously?”

 **@ImURGirl:** Mercie is here too

“I should block you all for bringing that greeting-card word into my chat,” Byleth said indignantly. “The amount of heart-shaped chocolate we made for this holiday, and I don’t even know what that word means.”

She laughed harder now, a violent cackle that raised the hair on the back of Felix’s neck.

“Enough about me. Valentine’s Day isn’t about chocolatiers; it’s about you guys, and we love that you love it.”

She raised a bowl of plump strawberries. “Time to teach you to dip your own chocolate-covered strawberries. Not only will this save you cash, but you also won’t have set foot inside a chocolate shop on Valentine’s Day…”

She set whipped cream to whisk in the mixer. Felix began to imagine Byleth’s fingers dipping into the bowl. He dreamed up fluffy cream pressing into her puckered lips.

A shameful relapse. Something wasn’t right.

In reality, if Byleth put her fingers into the mixer right then, they would be torn off by the whisk, leaving her beautiful hands a mess of bloody nubs.

Not only that, but for the first time, Felix realized that Byleth’s voice sounded _different_ when she was on air. It was raspier than in real life, slightly colder. Even if Byleth really did call his name now the way he once fantasized, he would hardly recognize it. How different it would sound from the way she called out to him in the real world?

His fantasy dissolved.

He sat up straight, stared into her face on the screen, and saw for the first time not who he wanted but who was there.

Beneath all her let’s-make-chocolate veneer and her camera poker-face was a Byleth who was currently trying to put a brave mask on self-doubt.

A Byleth who had started a candy-cane fight to get him to open up to her. A Byleth who had earnestly told him how much she wanted to touch his butt while standing outside an awkward Christmas banquet. A Byleth who had rang in the New Year asleep on his chest.

He typed into the chatbox: _I miss you._ He stared at the words, basked in their shame. He pressed backspace for a whole minute.

“…Turn your strawberry until the broad side faces you. Dip one side and then the other. This makes a shallow v-neck contour. Believe me, it looks nicer than a straight line...”

— — —

 **Truff:** humble pie  
 **Filling:** rhubarb pate fruit over white chocolate ganache and a layer of pie crust  
 **Shell:** white chocolate  
 **Ideal palate:  
** Temper Demon’s Inbox

 **@Pinelli_04432:** Look, Temper Demon. I’m in your corner on this. There's just no way that Jeralt's kid is stumped by something like boys. If you need to, smack him one with that killer left hook Jeralt taught us. You can handle this!

And try not to eat too much chocolate, I want you to be a challenge for me at training next weekend.

 **@TheRealFerdinandvonAegir:** I absolutely cannot stop thinking about what you said during your last video—how Valentine’s Day isn't meant for someone like you! Preposterous!

If you ask me, you deserve all the happiness and beauty and romance. Furthermore, in the over-a-year that I have most gratefully used your tutorials, you haven’t spoken about anything this way. My dearest wish this Valentine’s Day is that you find a way to follow your heart. Most sincerely, Ferdinand von Aegir

 **@ChemNerdLin:** I can’t claim to understand love, but I can tell from your meticulous chocolate work that you’re someone who respects chemistry.

Lust is a response to an increase of the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen, which spur on ‘the libido.’ At the same time, strong attraction triggers dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. It rewards the brain like a chemical high to make you giddy and euphoric.

The problem is, norepinephrine also triggers the fight or flight response. That might be why you developed cold feet. (Though I hear poor circulation and cold hands are desirable for a chocolatier. Don’t mind me, a little joke.)

If what you feel is attachment, then you are probably experiencing oxytocin, the ‘cuddle hormone.’ This hormone releases during a variety of activities, including sex and petting animals. It helps us create bonds, such as that feeling that many interpret as ‘love.’ When oxytocin is motivating your brain, you might have found the ‘real thing.’

That’s my complete diagnosis, the rest is up to you. Happy Valentine’s Day from Lindhardt

Claude paced into Byleth’s house, nostrils flaring as he sniffed out whatever festering corpse was stinking up the place. He found Byleth, hair unwashed, knees drawn up to her chest, eyes glued to some sad black-and-white sword-wielding warrior on the TV.

Byleth had already watched the few uplifting movies on Felix’s favorites list—from _The_ _Princess Bride_ to _Zorro_ , every one of them featured excellent sword-fighting—and now she was back to the samurai. In time-out on the couch arm, her phone displayed Temper Demon’s inbox which was steadily filling up with well-meaning missives.

“Teach, I came here to find my action hero best friend. All I see is a depressing B-movie zombie… who smells.” Claude wrinkled his nose. Byleth shrugged. “What are you doing, anyway?”

“Moping,” Byleth croaked.

“That much is clear. And what is this sad, sad-looking movie?” Byleth paused the film and peered up at her less-than-welcome friend through greasy bangs. Did he always have to be so well-coiffed and golden? His hair artfully disheveled in a feat of gel that took the better part of an hour, while she was on the couch counting grease stains on her t-shirt.

She shrugged again, her grimace very similar to the bloody samurai on screen.

“I can’t stand to see you like this. Let’s go rob a bank, start a bar fight, anything.” Byleth grunted. “Look at campsites with me? That always cheers you up.” From a master strategist, this was a feeble attempt. They camped in the same place every year. Jeralt had the spot reserved a month in advance.

Bored of her own life, Byleth grabbed Claude’s phone and keyed in the passcode. A chess app appeared onscreen. “Playing against Sylvain?” she asked as she scanned the board. 

“Don’t read the comments, By.”

Possessed by this first spark of interest she’d felt all week, like a cat trapped inside a cage at a butterfly pavilion, Byleth curiously scrolled to the chat history. “Sothis, this is filthy,” she said reading over luscious sext-messages, most of which had nothing to do with chess ( _most of which_ ). “Glad to hear your fellationship is going well.”

“It’s not just sex. I like him. He’s my kind of damaged goods, kind of like you.”

Byleth raised her eyebrows as another line of text rolled in before blushing and scrolling back to the game board. “You have him backed into a corner here.”

“Still talking about the sexting?”

“No, you’re two moves to check.”

“Shit. How did I not see that?”

“Too busy focusing on your dirty talk.”

Claude watched carefully as Byleth repositioned his queen, rendering the remainder of the game inevitable. “So Felix said he loved you?”

“Sylvain told you that?” She squinted.

“No. You did—all this:” Claude plucked distastefully at Byleth’s bleach-stained sweatpants. “And how you reacted just now.” He fell back into the sagging couch. “You know, some people wait their whole lives for someone to tell them that.”

“He can’t possibly mean it.” She gestured at Temper Demon’s inbox as another comment rolled to the top of the list: “He loves _her_.”

Claude watched Byleth like he was back at work and looking at a particularly difficult set of behaviors in his MLP code. If only he could label her variables, trace the commands of her classes, then he would know exactly how to help her.

Right then, all his intuition focused on one point of action: Byleth desperately needed a shower.

“Well, take it from someone who does love you, wallowing is not a good look for you.” Byleth handed Claude his phone back and leaned her head against his shoulder. “If you like him this much, you should talk to him.”

She glared at Claude as if he had never said anything quite so mutinous in his life.

“Fine,” he relented. “I’ll drop it. Jeralt mentioned you’re going to work on your day off?”

A whisper beneath tired-eyes: “There’s still so much to do.”

“Hey now,” Claude said, laughing at her deadpan dramatics. “Until then, how about you kick my ass virtually?” He stood, pressed a game controller into her hands, and started up Smash Bros. “Who are you going to beat me with this time?”

“Oh, you know who,” Byleth said, that old spirit of competition edging into her voice, as her game pointer clicked one of those blue-haired sword-wielders from the Fire Emblem franchise.

By the time he left, the schemer had one victory under his belt: Byleth had promised to shower.

When she got out—wearing clean clothes, no less!—Jeralt was lying in wait with 82 tabs of camping gear open on his tablet web browser.

“Before you go to work,” Jeralt said before unhurriedly pulling up the first of ten different brands of bedroll, “let’s pick our stuff.”

Jeralt clicked through specs on hammocks, beer coolers, and tackleboxes. Byleth despondently nodded along.

“But look at this!” He pulled the description of a high-heat pocket warmer, ideal for Byleth’s frigid hands. “How about that, huh?”

Byleth forced a weak smile. It was grotesque.

“What’s wrong with you? You usually love supplies shopping.”

She shrugged and zoomed in on the pocket warmers.

“Look, Kid,” Jeralt said, sighing like he had just been conscripted for battle. “When you were fifteen, some idiot broke your heart. You thought I didn’t know what was going on, but I did. I told you that there were ‘plenty of fish in the sea’.

“So what did you do? You nodded so sternly and told me that you wanted only the best fish.” Jeralt laughed softly. “Kid, I couldn’t have been prouder of that.”

Byleth put down the tablet and turned to watch her dad talk. “You became a difficult fish yourself—a lovable champion. It doesn’t make things easy on you.”

He paused to brush graying hair from his forehead.

“There are a lot of fish in this sea. Some of them are good fish. Not the small ones you batter and fry quickly before eating. Better even than the ones you marinade and bake. Some fish are so good that to cook them—”

“Cook them?!”

“Some fish are worth staking outside and letting them smoke for hours. They’re tender and full of flavor, and melt in your mouth, Kid.”

“Dad!” She shouted. “I’m not going to eat—”

He held his hand up. “Hear me out because this isn’t easy. I think there’s something I never managed to teach you. Without your mother, I let things slip by. And you were so strong and independent, I thought that was good enough.”

Byleth didn’t know when Jeralt started grabbing her shoulder.

“But, Kid—Byleth—I don’t want you to be alone. And if it’s my fault for not teaching you to reel in a good fish, then what kind of fisherman could I call myself?”

She didn’t know when she began clutching his elbow. “You’re going to make me cry.”

“Maybe you should. It would be good for you.”

“I had a fish on the line, a big one. Like a real game-changer of a fish. Worth days of smoking. And they were… they were fully hooked, and I couldn’t…”

“So you threw the fish back?”

“Yeah.”

“But you know where the fish likes to swim?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, hiding her eyes.

“And you know what bait the fish likes?”

— — —

 **Truff:** balsamic strawberry  
 **Filling:** strawberry pate fruit over dark chocolate ganache infused with a balsamic reduction  
(always reduce balsamic vinegar in a well-ventilated space  
protective goggles can also be useful  
or you might just cry)  
 **Shell:** 64%  
 **Ideal palate:** can i sit down? i’ve been hustling all day

Through the dim light of the bar, Felix saw Sylvain at his night job slinging cocktails, but that didn’t explain the unknown phone number messaging him to meet up in the corner booth. Felix stood before the table in question to see the slicked-back hair and immaculate beard of Byleth’s best friend.

“It’s you. Claude, right?” Felix asked, taking a seat.

“The Universe thought you could use some help, so it sent me as your consultant for the evening.”

“Sylvain set this up?”

Claude raised his eyebrows. Felix was keen, observant—this would be fun.

“Byleth too, though she doesn’t know it—and she’s not going to find out, you hear me?” Felix found himself looking into the beguiling eyes of someone who wouldn’t hesitate to poison his drink if crossed the wrong way; nothing fatal but highly unpleasant.

Sylvain brought them unsolicited whiskey with a tell-tale wink. Truly, the angel of mercy, considering Claude was already launching the conversation with:

“I’m not going to mince words. Particularly since, as I hear it, you never mince words for other people.” He reached into his leather messenger bag and pulled out a large hardback book. “You don’t love Byleth, not yet. You have every reason to, of course. And, if my prediction is correct you will very soon.”

“Is that a yearbook?” Felix reached out for it.

“Don’t touch!” Claude snapped as if Felix’s fingerprints could override whatever powerful memories were canoodling within the binding. “Wow, you really are just like her. So impatient, both of you.”

He pushed the highschool yearbook between them. Some pages were worn and wrinkled: beer stains and cake batter. Others were crisp and unloved as the day they were printed. 

Claude flipped to a page that was seventy percent drawn over with black sharpie: chess-piece symbols, mathematic code that Felix didn’t even know how to begin parsing, quotation fragments, and even one crudely rendered dick. “Excuse the marginalia,” he said, showing a little shame.

He pointed to a face, around which the seventeen-year-old version of himself had drawn devil horns and buck teeth.

“This was the first person Byleth ever fought for me. I don’t even remember what he said. It was rude, to say the least. She didn’t think twice, stepped up to him and kneed him in the balls right in front of our chem teacher.” Claude swished his whiskey, “I’ll never forget the tears in his eyes as he crumpled over.”

Felix didn’t comment. He simply looked at all the faces on the page, people who if only tangentially, knew Byleth before he did.

Claude flipped a clump of pages to Byleth’s yearbook portrait. Blank, pale-faced with eyes too large for her delicate bones. She had chopped her own hair, and it fell unevenly around her shoulders. “She failed chem that year and had to retake it in the summer. Her only regret was having to wake up early every morning of the holidays.”

“Byleth comes to work with me at 6 am every morning,” Felix muttered. “Or she used to…”

“It’s her job,” Claude shrugged. “Doesn’t mean she likes waking up that early. Though, I’m sure seeing you sweetened the pot.”

While Claude flipped to another creased layout of photos, Felix considered those times when Byleth had shown up before him to open. It was always after he had worked a particularly long day, wasn’t it?

“This is a bake sale Byleth won. It wasn’t a competition, but, of course, Byleth made it a competition. I think this must have been the first time she made chocolates for sale—cherry cordials.”

He flipped to the back cover where loose 35mms were hanging out between flyleafs scrawled over with repetitive messages of ‘have a great summer’ and ‘nice knowing you.’

He pulled out a loose photo of a boxer, and Felix took a second to register that it was Byleth underneath the bandage bridging her nose and puffy red skin of her cheek, which would have turned into a deep purple bruise the following day. “She lost this one. That’s her second broken nose.”

Felix scowled at the injured Byleth. “Was she fighting someone really strong?”

“No stronger than her, but she wasn’t focused.” Claude’s gaze pinned Felix to the booth the way an entomologist pins a prized beetle to the wall before bringing over a loupe to study its markings. “See, she was dating this guy,” without altering his focus, Claude pointed to a blurry figure in the background. “And I guess he was rather reckless with the l-word. He left her that weekend and that was a worse knock-out punch than anything she encountered in the ring. Have you heard the term ‘abandonment issues?’”

Claude flipped to another photo of Byleth boxing. Her hair was tied back in a bun, and she was watching the camera with that familiar straight-faced and determined expression. Something bright burned in her eyes, and without even knowing the story, Felix could tell that she was going to win this one.

Claude leaned back in the booth. “She was the champion for her weight division. They tried to recruit her for it professionally, but she knew what would happen. Use her until her body breaks and then leave her with nothing.”

He drained his glass and looked thoughtfully at Felix. “On the way back from that tournament, she decided to quit boxing competitively and make a go of it with baking. Whenever she’s making chocolates, she still listens to the psych up playlist we made that day.”

Felix had his head buried in his hands, but between his elbows directly within his line of sight was that determined image of Byleth.

“I know you’ve seen a lot of images of her,” Claude said kindly. “These are the real ones.”

“Why are you doing this?” Felix asked. The question might have sounded cold, but each word dragged his throat across hot coals.

“Because she likes you too. And if you knew anything about her, you’d know just how rare that is.”

  
— — —

 **Truff:** wine and roses  
 **Filling:** layer of dark cabernet-infused ganache, layer of white ganache flavored with rose oil  
 **Shell:** 64%, garnished with a dried rose petal  
 **Ideal palate:  
** valentine’s day stats

15,567 truffles sold  
384 truffles dropped on the floor  
3 staff members snuck into the bathroom for a quick cry  
65 tears were spilled in total  
40 people whined about the long lines  
7 people were on the phone with a florist while in line  
75 chocolate-covered strawberries were eaten by staff members  
Annette said, “I’m your girl,” 12 times when asked for help  
Hilda wrote “I Love You” on 37 and “Be Mine” on 15 heart-shaped cakes  
Ashe had to chuck 25% of his lattes into lidded cups after fucking up the art yet again  
6 customers ceased talking to Sylvain due to inappropriate comments about their significant other

For weeks straight, they hustled. Then Valentine’s Day left them in a whirlwind of numbers and pink & red ribbons. The chocolate shop closed in the evening. The romantics went on their dates; the cynics went to parties and bars; the service workers poured the booze and commiserated; the lonely retreated into their own minds; and the tired went home. Of the many options that fit the bill, Felix was the latter.

He had his hair down, was wearing lounge pants and about to put on a documentary or something equally riveting, when a knock sounded his door.

Kyphon was already sitting at the jamb, spookily tracking an invisible presence on the other side. Back and forth the cat paced.

The knock came again. Felix opened the door.

“Byleth?” he asked, watching her pace to and fro across the stupid welcome mat that Ingrid had bought him when he moved out of Rodrigue’s house. Her feet kicked and dragged in turns. Her hands clutched a box of chocolates, packaged in her own Temper Demon branding.

She looked up at him, saw his loose hair, his domestic comfort. “You would be such a delicious fish,” she said. “I would smoke you in the back yard for days until you were flavorful and succulent and falling apart in my mouth—”

Startled by her own words, she watched him try to figure out what to say. Would he unravel their meaning or close the door in her face?

“Wait, that didn’t come out right. You see,” she said passing the truffle box from one hand to the other, “here’s something you don’t know about me. I script my videos ahead of time. Sometimes I practice in the mirror. If I didn’t, I would ramble, sort of like this. I told you I was a shit conversationalist.”

“I don’t think—” Felix began to say, but she didn’t let him finish the thought.

“Look, Felix. I’m good at a lot of things,” she raised her fingers to count off each of her skills. “Chocolate, fighting, I can win a game of chess now and then.” A fourth finger shot up, “Did I mention fighting?”

Felix nodded. He wanted to grab the chocolates out of her hands, to keep them from shaking up too much and scuffing their shiny tempered surfaces.

“I have anxiety, just like you. And I get stressed. And you thought I only liked you for your body, but the truth is that’s how I cope.

“When that man in the gray suit today kept asking me about those weird Leicestrian chocolates, I nodded along because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I faked it. I fake a lot of things. Sometimes I fake-laugh at Sylvain’s jokes. That 'intense authority' I project on my show, that’s fake too. And that time I implied that growing up without my mom was fine, that was very fake.

“I don’t think we’re so different. I think you can understand a lot of this. Except you don’t fake anything at all. You’re always yourself.

“I don’t want the time I spent with you to be another thing I faked. I want you to be something I’m good at. I’m sorry that I didn’t know how to say these things before. Because I think I could be really good at knowing you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  [chapter song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2WDdccgaDY)   
> 
> 
> Huge thanks to Sav572 for talking at length about my characters’ _feelings_ with me, including giving me the very astute advice that I can’t just porn their problems away. <3
> 
> Take care and thanks for reading!


	8. this modern love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> february, Felix’s birthday, & the future

**Truff:** honeycomb  
 **Filling:** honey-sweetened dark ganache topped by pure honeycomb  
 **Shell:** so thin it’s barely there  
 **Ideal palate:** an old-world remedy, like when people say,  
‘time heals all wounds’ or ‘laughter is the best medicine’

Pine trees spired around the clearing. Cold breezes wafted nutty cedar through the branches. A hut shielded their campsite from snowfall, while the fire ate wooden offerings and spat out bugs in sparkling pops.

Beside that fire sat Byleth, perched on a worn stump that still bore the initials she had carved six years ago. She could hear Jeralt’s voice by the river. The water galloped, loud and wild quicksilver, engorged on early ice melt.

Yet, for some reason, Byleth could still smell the phantoms of chocolate. There was no escaping that rich, sweet smell. She checked for cocoa butter remnants beneath her fingernails as the fire blazed, yellow and orange and gold.  
  


. . .

  
Golds had battled the yellow and orange in Felix’s eyes. He took the box of Valentine’s chocolates from Byleth’s hand and peered through the plastic window. Each one was painstakingly painted with the little flames of her habanero truffles. For a moment, he said nothing. Then, he pulled her into a hug that knocked her nose against his collarbone.

And there, in the protection of his arms, he broke her heart a little more. “You were right,” he said. “I didn’t know you. I tried to make you into someone I had built up in my mind. You were right to be upset.”

Byleth’s voice cracked into his shoulder, “You tried to tell me. I didn’t take it seriously.”  
  


. . .

  
“Tell me she’s not still over there moping.”

Third-beer Claude was singing pop songs, and third-beer Jeralt was shushing him because he would scare away all the fish, and third-beer Byleth was gazing into the fire expressionless.

“What’s wrong with her?” Jeralt asked again. He kept his fishing line in the water, as they both peeked sneakily over their shoulders.

“I told her she needed to ‘unplug.’ Didn’t realize that meant staring at one spot like she ran out of batteries.”

Jeralt humphed. “She’s going to miss all the good fishing.”  
  


. . .

  
“Maybe we should have gone fishing on our date,” Byleth had tried to laugh. “We would have huddled for warmth under my down blanket.”

Felix’s embrace fell away, and Byleth shivered. She watched him lean against the external wall of his apartment, peering down at his hands. “This would have come up at one point or another.”

Byleth paced, arms crossed.

So Felix wanted them to _know_ each other. She could do that. She could let him in.

“My mom catered wedding cakes for the Church of Seiros.”

Felix jerked his head up and tracked her movements.

“Growing up, all I saw were photos of her piping intricate designs onto these three-tiered masterpieces.

“You asked me once, ‘why pastry?’ That’s why. It’s also why the Church commissioned White Clouds for those chocolate statues. I do work for them sometimes.”

Byleth’s face was pale and tired and still so pretty. Felix could hardly look at her. He cleared emotional shrapnel from his throat. “Thank you. For telling me.”

He might have left it at that. For what seemed like ages, he struggled with himself. His face morphed from fraught squinting to softness to sadness to frustration, before finally finding words.

“I was a kid,” he began, “when my mom walked out. Slow stupid divorce. Rodrigue called it ‘practical’ since she left for her career. I don’t miss her. But my family—all we do is work. Any of us could become her; the kind of person who abandons two kids to get ahead. I have that in me, needing to be the best, I’m constantly battling it.

“I was losing that battle, I guess. Then you came along. And—look, I’m only going to say this once—you weren’t the person I thought you would be. You’re unpredictable, passionate, and really fucking weird. But you helped me more than you know.”

  
. . .

  
“You know I’m not going to let you spend this whole trip rehashing every detail of your breakup, right?”

Claude cracked sticks into the fire. He raised a flaming branch and pointed it at her.

“Cheer up, my algae-haired friend! He’ll come around.”

He paused to examine his makeshift torch as if Claude von Riegan was solely responsible for inventing the very element of fire. Byleth smiled slightly.

“So Felix wants to go slow. So you’ve never taken anything slow in your life. Give him time to remember what he’s missing.”

He showered some sparks at her, and she jumped up abruptly, punching the ground with thick-soled hiking boots to extinguish each cinder.

“Nice dancing, By. That’s the spirit.” Claude ditched the branch back into the fire and joined her in stamping out the sparks. Meanwhile, Byleth was muttering under her breath something that sounded distinctly like: _you little shit._

“Now, I’ve always wanted to try dipping your hair in the water to see if fish will nibble it like seaweed.”

“Over my dead body,” she growled.

“Hate to have to kill you, but… Jeralt has been showing me his fancy fishing cast. If you don’t prove that you can outfish me right this moment, your hair is going in that water.”

Claude grinned impishly and stuck a live cricket from their bait box into Byleth’s hand. She squinted ferociously at him with her fingers clenched around the bug as it hopped to squirm free.

“Look on the bright side, Teach, if your hair does attract fish, we could market it and sell it as high-end bait.”

“I’m not losing to you!” She yelled. She stabbed the cricket onto her hook, before chasing her friend over root and under tree to the river where Jeralt was grimacing about the noise they were making.

Byleth’s father stood in the high water with a bucket of caught fish settled on a nearby rock. His tall boots were muddy, and there were splash marks up to his knees and across his chest. Jeralt watched Claude cast; the line fell wide over the water before getting dragged into the flow.

“How’s that?” Claude asked.

“It’s a start.”  
  


. . .

  
“So, it’s a start, right?” Byleth had asked, garden eyes larger than Felix had ever seen them. “Should I come in to talk more?”

He felt his mouth moving like a ventriloquist dummy. “It’s not a good idea,” he heard himself saying.

“What?” Her voice cracked. Her throat ached.

“I think we should go slow. Be friends.”

“You don’t want to be with me?”

“Don’t you get it?!” He was yelling, and he didn’t know how to stop. “I do want to be with you. For a long time. It’s why we should take things slowly.”

“So what does that mean?”

Felix watched her eyes grow dark as she realized: it meant she had to leave.

She was so small. Her words were so small. The Universe suddenly seemed so very fucking small.

Then, a spark grew. He watched the fighter rise in her. She paced to him. Her boxer’s hands were too quick to track as she grabbed his shoulder. “Wait, no. Don’t say it.” She bobbed on her toes, let her lips brush his cheek. “I’ll go. We can both use the rest.”

He closed his eyes on her receding back. For a moment he wondered what was in his hands and found himself holding those spicy habanero chocolates.  
  


. . .

  
“Where did you pack the chocolate for the s’mores?” Claude asked, eyeing a backpack stuffed so tight it was ready to rip its stitching.

She pulled out her bedroll and sleeping bag, another blanket, a book of ghost stories, a big bag of square-cut homemade marshmallows, rectangles of chocolate bearing the Temper Demon brand, and graham crackers in a tin salvaged from Christmas shortbread cookies.

They whittled sticks to skewer their ‘mallows and watched the sugar burn in the campfire. They inched closer to its heat. Far from the light-pollution of the city, they tilted their heads upward to see every star.

Sometimes, the Universe could appear so small and petty, and it made her pay a sacrifice for every experience.

At that moment, though, as Byleth leaned back from her tree-stump perch and gave herself a wide view, the Universe stretched out her possibilities like a road map. And she was the one zooming, lead foot on the pedal, connecting star to star in her own personal constellations. That, she realized, was called making a life.

And that life thing was built from components, just like every formula or recipe she had ever baked up in her kitchen. Except these components were things like: ‘friends and family’ (who aren’t so bad after all), and events like ‘spending time with someone who makes everything feel just a little brighter and more interesting’ (which came awfully close to the L-word), and ‘people who make you better as you make them better’ (the most underrated component by far).

The night was cold, and Byleth shifted closer to the fire. Jeralt’s breath slowed and turned into snuffles that she knew would soon become full snores. Claude chuckled lightly. A some-things-never-change chuckle, and Byleth laughed back. The tall pines swayed, and the fish shoaled deeper in the river, and the water—now freed from the ice—wasn’t stopping for anything.

— — —

**Truff:** dirty earl gray latte  
 **Filling:** earl gray ganache boosted with bergamot oil makes the largest portion,  
above that a layer of espresso ganache,  
and at the top to mitigate all the bitterness rising from beneath,  
white chocolate vanilla bean ganache  
 **Shell:** there is no shell  
 **Ideal palate:** every morning when i saw you walk through the door,  
i had to wonder if it was the caffeine accelerating my heartrate  
or the way you shook your hair out from the wind  
and walked on by to hang up your coat

Sylvain transferred his latte from a paper cup into one of Ingrid’s mugs and set it on the counter. Immediately, Felix smelled the harsh bergamot from the dirty Earl Gray steaming like a smoke signal.

“Why are you drinking that?” Felix snapped, while irritably trying to shake away too many mental images of Byleth cradling mugs full of that same damn latte.

“It’s an extra from making Byleth one this morning,” Sylvain said easily, as if it didn’t mean a thing.

“Byleth went to work?! She’s back from camping?”

“She picked up her last paycheck. Didn’t stay long.”

Like a child sneaking a cookie from the jar, Felix palmed one of Byleth’s spicy Valentine’s chocolates and shoved it in his mouth. It burned so good.

Was it a sign that she had only gone to the shop on his day off? Did it mean something that she was back from camping, and he still hadn’t heard from her?

Apparently, being friends was another way of inviting radio silence.

Felix regretted everything.

On top of that, she had canceled all of her Temper Demon livestreams and videos for the week.

“So stir-fry cook-off tonight!” Sylvain inexpertly tossed a spatula in the air and caught it. “Who’s going to win this time?”

Felix humphed. Anyone in their right mind would put their money on Glenn. Still, Felix felt that if there was any justice in the Universe, he could use a win. He was meticulously arranging his stir fry station around one of the induction burners Glenn had ‘borrowed’ from work, when his brother and Ingrid entered carrying overstuffed bags of groceries.

“Ingrid, are you cooking in this one?” Sylvain asked, trying his spatula toss again. This time it fell on the floor. Stubby-legged Loog bounded after it and gave the spatula a good lick to double-check for crumbs.

“You bet I am!” Ingrid said, unloading poultry, broth, and mushrooms. “Since I’m not ‘impartial’ enough to judge anymore.”

“Glenn won every time,” Sylvain complained, in between wrestling the spatula from the dog and rinsing it in the sink.

“Ingrid likes what I cook.” Glenn shot her a cocky grin as he unloaded a bunch of vegetables—carrots, celery, onions, water chestnuts, and other staples of the rabbit diet—at his own station.

“Tch, please. Ingrid just likes food,” Felix drawled, looking distastefully at Glenn’s disproportionate lack of meat.

“Sounds like someone else I know.”

And there she was again: the ghost of Byleth, conjured from Glenn’s words. She seemed to hang in the air, rubbing her stomach and looking wide-eyed at each station, where vegetables waited to be chopped and various meats and sea-foods were about to find themselves floating in a sweet and savory melange of marinades.

Felix shook his head in frustration. His fingers crawled across his phone screen to refresh Byleth’s Twitter feed. Nothing new.

Glenn never seemed to miss a thing. “So how’s ‘just friends’ treating you?”

“Sucks.” Felix switched his phone display from a photo he had taken of Byleth on New Year’s morning— disheveled hair, eyeshadow smudged all to hell, goofy hungover smile—to her social media again.

“Refreshing her feed won’t make her post anything,” Ingrid said practically. “You could call her.”

“We’re taking space, to get to know each other better.”

“How are you going to get to know her if there’s space?” Glenn’s tone was almost as honed as the knife he was currently using to dice out perfect squares of eggplant.

“It’s not like you and Ingrid. We all grew up together—knew everything about each other. But Byleth and I are adults now. She has this whole life before and outside of me.”

Glenn cleared his throat with a growl that sounded suspiciously like, _idiot_. “You have a whole life before and outside of her too. It’s called being a person, Fe.” 

Glenn thought he was so clever with his fucking truth-bombs. Felix scoffed and refreshed Byleth’s feed. Nothing.

“You’re still treating her like some unattainable idol that you just lucked out at getting with. Treat her like a person. If it was you, how would you expect her to get to know you?”

“I guess we would do things together.”

“So why aren’t you?”

Felix thought for a moment. He waited until everyone was focused on cooking. Then, he took a picture of his station: dried chilies half-ground in a mortar-and-pestle, one brightly colored carrot, and sliced steak marinading in hot sauce and vinegar.

He sent it to Byleth, typing: _We’re having a stir fry competition._

Felix put extra ummmph into grinding his chilies. He stared into his sizzling wok for what seemed like hours, before Byleth typed back, _Who’s the judge?_

Glenn suspiciously watched Felix take a picture of his dog. Loog’s massively pointy ears were standing at attention while he performed pirouettes in the hope that Sylvain would mercifully throw a scrap.

He sent the pic to Byleth, then waited while the ever-so-promising and ever-so-damning ellipses tangoed at the bottom of the screen before disappearing.

The actual judge showed up at the door. Tall, broad, and polite as ever, he dodged a low-hanging hallway chandelier and flicked outdated ‘90s-rocker hair out of clear blue eyes.

“Hi everybody,” Dimitri said taking a seat at the table. “Thank you for inviting me. I can’t wait to eat all this.”

“Dimitri’s our impartial judge?” Felix asked sardonically. “He can’t even taste anything.”

“That means you might actually win, Fe.” Glenn grinned at his sizzling onions. Ingrid kept her head down and chopped mushrooms like a demon.

As the childhood friends seared and sauteed and rocked their woks, throwing in noodles and mushrooms and spouting oils and vinegars into the mix, Dimitri set the rice cooker and kindly dusted the neglected top of the fridge.

It was half an hour later when Felix received a new message from Byleth.

 _I went fishing,_ it said. In a picture, Byleth trailed a lazy fishing line into a local reservoir. On the water’s surface, he could see the reflection of green hair and her crouching knee. Frosted grasses across the way framed the upper portion of the photo.

Maybe she hadn’t updated her social media. Maybe she had canceled her livestreams. But Byleth was taking time to do the things that Byleth liked to do.

 _It’s nice,_ he replied.

Felix seared his meat with renewed gusto. Something told him that this time his stir-fry would be even better than Glenn’s.

— — —

**Cake:** chocolate and spice carrot cake  
 **Filling:** salty caramel mousse  
 **Icing:** “adults eat cake,” Felix said blandly  
while Lysithea hissed at him through a mouth full of buttercream  
 **Ideal palate:** another goddamn party for another goddamn year older

Felix’s surprise birthday parties were never a surprise.

He didn’t like meaningless celebrations. Not to mention, if any true surprise came his way, that spicy little man was liable to explode with rage, sling insults at all his guests, and run out of the party before Lysithea could cut the cake.

This time, though, Glenn really did have a surprise for him.

She was a green-haired trainwreck of a human being, who stood in the corner, looking like she had just slipped in from some other dimension, with chocolate icing in her hair and a poorly wrapped gift in hand.

How did she end up there, you ask?

Well, Byleth had been heading home from the boxing gym when she received a phone call from a local unknown number.

As soon as she picked up, Felix’s voice was asking her, “What are you doing on Saturday?”

“Felix?” Byleth had breathed over the sounds of her aging car.

“No, it’s Glenn.” Sharp laughter; he was probably used to that confusion.

Byleth responded with her most eloquent silence.

“Saturday is Felix’s birthday. I’m throwing him a party.”

“I didn’t know…” She parked in front of her house and limply leaned her head against the steering wheel.

“So? I’m telling you now. Come to the party.” Glenn exhaled the long breath of a five-minute smoke break. “He won’t admit it, but he wants to see you, and I’m sick of the moping. Anyway, I have to go.” Another long exhale and Glenn hung up the phone before she could protest.

That, of course, led to Byleth dragging Claude to Felix’s birthday party the way a toddler carries their favorite stuffed animal into an emergency tornado shelter.

The only problem was, Sylvain seemed to think Byleth had brought Claude just for him. He grabbed his boyfriend’s arm, pulled Rodrigue’s olivewood chess set from the fireplace mantle, and began setting it up at the card table.

“Chess at a birthday party?”

“Felix won’t care,” Sylvain said easily. “Any minute now he’s going scowl through here and tell us all to fuck off home. It’s more of a hazing ritual than a celebration.”

“I really shouldn’t be here.” Byleth was looking horrified at the gift in her hands. _Hazing?_ She hadn’t meant to be part of hazing Felix; he already wanted her out of his life as it was. She started scuttling toward the door, but before she could leave, Claude and Sylvain sprinted up from the card table and tugged her back into the room.

Which was how Byleth found herself haunting the corner with a gift tied up in baking parchment and ribbons. A ghost, of the awkward ex-lover variety, she picked at one of Lysithea’s carrot spice cupcakes, did her best not to shove it wholesale into her mouth, and listened to Felix’s friends talk.

From the moment Felix stepped into his party, face burning red from the first screamed syllables of “Happy Birthday!”, rumors of Byleth traveled to him: through the air, from the guests, whenever he caught sight of her minty green hair as she ran from corner to corner like a game of tag.

Grumping, scowling, and yet still besotted, Felix pursued her until he finally managed to snag her shoulder. She spun to face him, knocking the hard casing of her gift right into his solar plexus.

Gasping and winded, Felix grabbed the present.

Byleth clung on. She hadn’t given it to him yet, and it wasn’t his to take!

As they struggled, the gift wrapping became more and more disheveled. Crinkled baking parchment, uneven bows. From one ribbon trailed the birthday note she had painstakingly written; it hung between them like the white flag of surrender.

Using the present like a tether, he tugged her into the quiet hallway and grasped her shoulder. Angry lines formed between his eyebrows and hollowed out his eyes. Schooling her face straight and plain, Byleth edged closer to the door. If she was about to be chucked out, she wanted to be ready for it.

Felix was a conflicting spice-blend of so many instincts. He wanted to trample the gift she brought. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to carry her away, wrapped up in him the way a dragon guards a hoard of treasure. 

“Where have you been?” He yelled hoarsely. “Your show has been canceled all week.”

Shocked, Byleth dropped the present leaving it in Felix’s grasp.

“You’re not throwing me out?” Finding her hands suddenly empty, Byleth didn’t know what to do with them. 

She wanted those hands to pull Felix closer and smooth the angry lines from his face. She wanted to wrap them in his hair, and maybe even reach down his pants a little bit.

She crossed her arms. “I’ve been busy.”

“You took another job?” He seemed mad about that too.

“No. I went fishing and watched movies.”

“What? You stopped working to watch movies?”

“Swordfighter movies. I liked the part when the samurai—”

“You watched my movies!? Instead of working, you watched my favorite movies?”

“Only the ones you ranked highly on your Letterboxd profile. Your reviews are very detailed, by the way… and kind of harsh…”

“You’ve been stalking me? Why in the hell?”

Byleth chose to ignore this latest hypocrisy and strike at the heart of the matter.

“You watched those movies when you were lonely, right? And you fantasized that I was there to enjoy them with you. Isn’t that why you got so upset that night?”

Felix didn’t know what to say. No one—no therapist, no friend, not even Glenn—had ever given one of his outbursts so much thought as to offer him back such bland and honest summary as that.

“Well now I’ve done the same thing,” she said looking everywhere but at him. “I was lonely, and I watched those same movies. And I wished you were there with me. I get it.”

There was shrapnel in his chest and an ache in his jaw. He looked down at his hands and found the box he had unwittingly taken from Byleth. “What is this?”

“It’s a present. You’re supposed to open it.”

He finally took a good look at the case. It was shaped like a thin rectangular toolbox. He untied the fraying ribbons, draping them on Byleth as he went.

Through the tinted plastic window of the case, he could see a girthy teal shaft and thick rounded section at the very bottom. It was _large._

Red-faced and flustered, he peered closer:

Curved? Slightly.  
Flexible? Possibly.  
Cushy? Certainly.  
Phallic? Um… yep.

“…it’s still mostly manual,” she was saying. “I didn’t think you needed anything too high tech for the first time…”

If that wasn’t boggling enough, metal glinted from the top of the toy. “What the—?” Felix’s heart-rate jumped up a few frequencies. “It’s a…”

He undid the snaps of the case to examine it further—

“…fishing rod.” His breath rushed out in a complicated explosion of thoughts:

_A fishing rod. Just a fishing rod. Byleth wasn’t crazy enough to get him a sex toy for his birthday. Did he wish Byleth would have gotten him a sex toy for his birthday?_

_Mostly, he wanted Byleth for his birthday._

He took a moment to catch his breath and examine the collapsed metal rings that would hold the line, the detached reel that had been previously hidden from view, the small kit of hooks, sinkers, and bobs that came with it.

“If you want it,” Byleth said with complete sincerity. “See, there are things I want to share with you too.”

Felix snapped the case shut and set it on the ground, letting it clatter the last few inches to the floor.

Byleth swallowed hard. She tightened her arms across her chest, defensively preparing for a fight:

_Had she yet again said the wrong thing? Moved too quickly? Overstayed her welcome?_

Every emotion invaded his face, from frustration, to lust, to something soppy and soft like an oversoaked lady-finger at the bottom of tiramisu.

His hand thudded on the wall next to Byleth’s head. Her eyes flared open, wide and shocked, as his raw expression was inches away from her face. She could pick out the golden flecks in his eyes, the soft feathering of each individual eyelash. She held that devastating eye contact as his other hand came up to cup her chin.

He breathed in. He sighed out.

His lips found hers. They were soft and kind and so so sweet; chocolate and honey, without the sugar, just the taste. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pulled him against her.

— — —

**Truff:** cherry cordial  
 **Filling:** brandy-soaked cherry in a sweet fondant spiked with kirschwasser  
 **Shell:** 65% dark with the stem out  
 **Ideal palate:** in a lifetime of firsts, “I love you” is just another cherry to be popped

Many chocolatiers build their truffles from the inside out. They start at the heart of the matter, the ganache with its rich buttery inner center, then they wrap it up in chocolate and polish it with a garnish. And they’ve always known—they’ve never had to question—what’s at the center.

Felix doesn’t do that. He works his way in from the outside, and when he finally gets to bite the heart, it’s a miracle to find that it all came together.

  
**Step 1: Airbrush a Design**

_Pretty cocoa butter paint gives the eyes something to devour._

  
Byleth had come to him that night tied up in ribbons. She stood before him and pulled her blouse high over her head, letting her hair fall on top of straps and lingerie, which outlined her breasts in high lacy cups.

Felix watched her fingers disappear up to her knuckles into the top of her skirt, his pants suddenly feeling very tight.

She toyed with the key of her skirt zipper. Pulling it down a few lengths, pulling it back up part of the way. Pulling it down again and back up a little bit less each time.

Felix started across the room, fully intending to rip that fucking skirt off her. Before he could, she was already shifting her hips and pushing it down the black lace of her stockings. They ran up her thighs, gartered to the ribbons that were wrapping her hips.

He hadn’t known need like this before. To touch the skin rising above the stockings. To bury himself in the curves spilling from the cups of her bra. Each gap between black ribbon and black lace shot desperation through his throat, down with the heat flushing his chest, and the visible tenting in his pants.

Byleth tucked a finger into one of the ribbons tied at her hip and ran it slowly from back to front stopping just past her hip bone. She dug a little deeper.

His hand glided through the air until it tangled into the soft mentholated waves of her hair and pulled her face to his. The desperation was in the kiss, the need to open her up, tongue tracing into her mouth in search of all those spicy desires: the biting, sucking, kissing, fingering, fucking, loving. Those promises she kept inside. He wanted them engraved into his bones.

She took his hand and placed it on the cup of her breast. Immediately, as if some spell were broken, he began grasping her above the horizon of the lingerie and circling her skin with his thumb. His other hand pushed aside lace and ribbon to hold her hip.

“What happens,” he muffled the words into her hair, “What happens when I take all these ribbons off you?”

She slipped her hands under his turtleneck in the same slow tease she had used to remove her skirt. “You can use them to tie me up.” One finger at a time, up to the knuckles. “Keep me with you this time.” She pressed into the hardness of his abs, finding his warmth before traveling against his soft Felixy underbelly. 

“Shit, Byleth,” he threw his head back. “Stay, please.” His throat was exposed over the turtleneck, and she rose against him to kiss it before impatiently tugging his sweater up and over his head.

  
**Step 2: Mold the Shell**

_A satisfyingly crunchy exoskeleton._

  
Late nights were when Byleth opened up to Felix. Her fingers would fly over the haptic keyboards of her phone with little stories about her life. Some came from deep and rich and painful places. Others were simpler, such as the night before their fishing date at the reservoir:

<Byleth>  
I used to eat smoked salmon on a bagel every morning. One time, though, I got sick as a dog from it. I had to cancel my show for a few days because of projectile vomiting. It was misery.

<Felix>  
So now you never eat smoked salmon?

<Byleth>  
No, I still do. It’s delicious. You want me to pick up some before we go fishing tomorrow?

<Felix>  
I’ll do it. Sleep in.

The next day, with the sound of the reservoir waterfall behind them and their breakfast bagels perched on a large boulder, Byleth tried to teach Felix to fish.

“You’re jabbing too much,” she said holding her sides from laughter as he tangled his line yet again. His hook bobbed barely a foot away in the water. “And don’t move your feet like that. Swing it wide.”

“That leaves you open for a jab to the chest.”

He turned his red-faced frustration into bitter complaints. He didn’t want Byleth to see him like this: bad at something she liked to do.

She laughed again.

“The fish don’t carry swords, Felix.”

Her arms came around him from behind. Her face fell between his shoulder blades.

Why was she hugging him? He was failing her!

He reeled in his line, tried his cast again. “That’s progress,” she said.

By midday, Felix had stopped swinging, content to sit on a boulder at the water’s edge with Byleth wedged between his legs. She let her line drop lazily into the water and waited.

His fingers traced up her thighs, tacit communication: _will you still like me if I never get good at fishing?_

She pressed back against his chest: _don’t be an idiot._ A flick of her wrist jerked the line to entice a nearby carp. She held the rod between her thighs and turned back to tuck some wayward bangs behind his ear: _of course I would._

He held her, and she held the rod, and every so often they felt a nibble from the fish Felix would be cooking up that night.

  
**Step 3: Pipe the Filling**

_Nuts and pralines, caramels and fruit preserves, jams and ganaches. Bite the heart and see what you find._

  
“What’s the plan this time?” Byleth asked, phone to her ear and car sputtering on its way to Felix’s apartment.

This was becoming the way of things. Cranky and anxious after filming one of her shows, Byleth would seek Felix out.

“Keep it simple. Order in and a movie.”

Byleth knew that movies were Felix’s way of testing her. He watched her reactions. He picked favorite scenes to reveal parts of himself. The burden of watching a movie was, at times, anything but simple.

“Do you agree?” he asked abrasively when she was silent for too long.

“Sounds great, I’d love to watch one of your films about people having to make the most of impossible situations against terrible odds.”

“That’s what you think of it?” Displeased.

“It’s what you find relaxing. Felix Hugo Fraldarius: watches stressful films to relax, shockingly agile even while drunk, calls his cat a bastard then treats him like a little prince. Am I forgetting anything?” Felix didn’t deign to answer. “Oh yeah, says he doesn’t like sweets but gobbles down Lysithea’s carrot cake like a fiend.”

“Just drive quickly so I can see you.”

“I always do.”

But when Felix met her at the door, it wasn’t to turn on a movie.

It was with his hair falling around his shoulders and a soft intention in his face. He swiped it back self-consciously as she melted against him, cool mint eyes peering at him through thick lashes while her fingers looped into the top of his pants.

As soon as he pulled her across the threshold, he began undressing her. And Byleth had nothing to complain about.

  
**Step 4: Cap and Pop Out**

_The moment of truth. Seal everything together and pop out a piece of tiny gastronomic art._

  
By late March, Felix was regularly coming home to find Byleth on his doorstep like a stray cat he’d once offered tuna. If he didn’t think it would freak her out, he’d make her a key.

“You were at work this whole time? What’s going on?” she asked, following him into his tiny apartment. 

She pulled the blinds to let in the last natural light. She gave Kyphon a treat as bribery to pat him on the head. She opened Felix’s fridge to find ingredients for one of her rapid-fire hob-goblin meals.

All the while, Felix gave halting explanations of truffle orders, and chocolate sculptures, and ornate flowering cake toppers.

“The Church of Seiros is sending us all their wedding orders. They were pleased by how you managed the banquet. We’re completely overwhelmed.” He pinched the corners of his eyes. “So we’re hiring. I’ll have to train somebody. Which means you’ll be seeing even less of me for a while.”

“I can’t imagine you training anyone.” Byleth threw a cast iron pan on the stove and prepared to rough-chop a slab of meat. She had learned her lesson to use Felix’s special spice blend only after removing it from heat; otherwise, it pepper-sprayed the whole apartment.

“I’m not good at it. I’ve made people cry.” Which was also the effect of the aforementioned spice blend.

Byleth looked pityingly down into the skillet. She threw the meat on the burner and turned to face Felix, leaning up against the counter. “So hire me.”

His gaze flicked up at her and then away. “You told Edelgard you weren’t coming back.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“You hate having coworkers and schedules and early mornings.”

“Those aren’t so bad. If it makes things easier on you…” She shrugged and ignored the meat sizzling on the stove.

She was looking at him with something immaterial and world-ending in her expression. A nothing. A nothing that was really something. A nothing that was completely everything.

“I’ll come back to White Clouds under one condition.”

“Name it.”

— — —

**Truff:** hot habanero  
 **Filling:** a world coalesced in the warmth of two palms touching   
**Shell:** a perfect kiss to melt against the lips every time  
 **Ideal palate:** it’s the capsaicin in peppers that makes your mouth feel like it's burning.  
it triggers your heat-sensitive pain receptors without causing any real heat or damage.  
it's a reflexive pain to warn you that whatever you're eating could be dangerous

but the sensation of burning is so convincing

if you can feel it, doesn't that make it real?

“You have to wear the pink apron.” She pulled it from a cupboard as Felix swiftly tied his hair up.

“You can’t be serious.” He rolled his sleeves.

“I’m very serious.” She rocked onto her toes to force it over his head.

“I’m not coming on the show wearing this,” he growled, as she went behind him to tie it up. Her hands momentarily lingered against the warmth of his back.

“Too late,” she whispered up to his ear. “We’re already live.”

“What?!” His face was almost as pink as the apron, but that was nothing to the bright red tips of his ears. He adjusted the bulky white lace of one of the straps, a perfectionist even when abetting his own humiliation. 

Byleth pulled a small remote from her pocket. She tossed it into the air and cockily caught it before turning to the camera.

“Hi everyone! Meet my guest, Chef Felix,” Byleth spoke into her camera rig.

Meanwhile, Felix began nervously juggling a paring knife while stabbing the camera lens in the heart with one of his signature glares.

“He’s one of the best chocolatiers I’ve ever met, and I had to beg him to come onto my show, so this is a real treat.”

Felix could feel his ears burning as he caught sight of the chatbox:

 **@GautierKnight:** he gets a little stabby when he’s nervous  
 **@GlennLives:** I’m gonna laugh if he drops that knife  
 **@ImURGirl:** shut up, guys! Mercie and I have been waiting for a special like this for AGES

“Felix is a lover of all things spicy,” Byleth was still saying.

 **@Claude:** yeah he is ;)  
 **@LadyValentine:** i can think of one in particular

Watching the chat flood with chili peppers and flame emojis, Felix tossed the knife up and caught it. How in the hell did Byleth work in these conditions? With people commenting all the time?

But she went on like nothing was happening. “He gave me a few pointers to revamp my recipe for my signature habanero truffles. So let’s get started…”

They worked together smoothly, with the ease of two people who knew each other’s movements. How to dodge, when to weave, and the right time to step out of the fucking way.

When at last, it was time to taste the ganache, Felix found its spice tepid at best. He added more birds-eye chilis, more habanero oil.

Byleth dug her spoon in and brought a fateful glob of ganache to her mouth.

It started with a sweat droplet. Then, her whole forehead was damp, and her eyes were watering, and her face was turning red from top to bottom. Felix could swear there was literal steam coming from her ears.

“Holy fucking shit!” Byleth grabbed a glass of milk and chugged while Felix cackled sharply behind his hand. “That’s so hot!” She refilled and chugged another. “Burning! I’m burning!”

And then, Felix saw it.

A small glossy bit of hot chili pepper ganache remained on Byleth’s lips.

“You have something right there,” he said, before leaning in to kiss the corner of her mouth.

The spice smacked him immediately with pure fire, like sipping air off a propane torch.

She braced herself against his chest. Grabbed a frill of the pink apron. For what seemed a dozen heartbeats, Felix’s lips pecked the spicy sweetness from hers.

THEY’RE KISSING, screamed the chatbox.

“I forgot to mention,” Byleth said, unable to hide her reckless grin from the camera. “This lunatic is also my boyfriend.”

Felix couldn’t help smirking down at Byleth through low eyelashes as the chat filled up with all-caps screaming and eggplant emojis.

Beneath the counter, where the eye of the camera couldn’t see, Byleth slipped her hand into Felix’s and held it tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  [chapter song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ9vPoecPZs)   
> 
> 
> Thank you all for reading and supporting my little choco-centric storytelling niche! I hope you've enjoyed these holiday specials. <3 Have a good one!  
> 


End file.
